ABSTRACT. The European Commission (EC) is one of the largest funders of research in Europe with its dedicated funding programme Horizon Europe, totalling at EUR 93.5 billion (2021–2027). A budget that has recently been doubled for its next chapter (2028–2034). The Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) is the commission’s executing body, responsible for distributing these large funds and help realise the EU’s research and innovation policy. Within this policy, Open Science (OS) has been given a central role, leading to the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), an OS working group, and varying other initiatives. As important political actors, the DG RTD, EOSC as well as this OS working group have since begun, defining Open Science for the European research space and promoting their (specific) notions of openness, emphasising its universal ability to make research more efficient, robust, and productive (to varying degrees of success). Given their political reach, these actors end up directly impacting and influencing local (research) practices of researchers, academic administrations, and scientific communities across Europe. This is achieved mainly by legally requiring researchers to adhere to their notions of openness when applying for EU funding. In this presentation, I will therefore take a closer look at these notions as promoted by the DG RTD, EOSC and their dedicated OS working group. I will present interview excerpts with involved actors, questioning the universality of their understandings of openness by highlighting their disciplinary backgrounds and contrasting their notions with definitions and practices from other more localised contexts. I will further highlight how the EU’s approach of legally mandating openness might create resistances from researchers across Europe.

ABSTRACT. Security & Privacy (S&P) research is essential to advance the development of digital systems for the benefit of users, who may, however, be exposed to risks when, for example, internet measurements are carried out in real networks. Historically, computer science has prioritized engineering and algorithms over social impact; consequently, many researchers lack the training to systematically evaluate how their work affects individuals and social systems. This has created a tension between research practices and the user’s demands on security and privacy within the digital space.

Various cases of ethical misconduct, such as the 'Hypocrite Commit' case, led to ethics reviews becoming mandatory at major conferences. As these venues represent prestigious publication bottlenecks, they act as gatekeepers for scien- tific norms. However, this top-down centralization frequently neglects localized academic norms of individual researchers and their institutional idiosyncrasies, which can lead to defensive behavior or event motivate the bypassing of these procedures. To analyse these dynamics, we treat ”responsible research” as a scientific practice. In addition to our previous work (Dirksen et al. 2024), we incorporate new findings from computational text analysis of research pub- lications where we identify the actors (e.g., researchers, IRBs), actions (e.g., assessing, informing), and targets (e.g., users) involved in S&P research.

This talk sheds light on the tension between domain-specific research practices, external regulations, and the requirements of international publication venues, focusing on the research domain of S&P. Our discussion pursues an interdisciplinary approach, integrating perspectives from the Philosophy of Science, Sociology, and Computer Science. In result we advocate for novel governance paradigms that prioritize institutionalization while addressing the fragmentation of current review procedures.

ABSTRACT. Recently, the Dutch funding organization NWO issued a call for doing ‘replication studies’. Researchers in the social sciences, in the medical sciences, and in the humanities could apply to this call. Here, I argue that this call can be seen as an epistemic science policy experiment. It operationalized an epistemic framework of diagnostic replication. Several philosophers and STS researchers had warned, however, that this kind of epistemic framework does not provide an epistemic fit across all disciplines, or ‘ways of knowing’. It is thus an interesting research question to empirically track what happened when the underlying epistemic idea of this funding call was ‘released into the wild’ (i.e. into diverse scientific practices). First, I will explore more in-depth what was the local context for issuing this call in the first place. I will then present what happened in the funded projects: what were the motives to apply, the surprises, the expectations, the problems, and the outcomes of the projects? For this, I use ethnographic material that I gathered between 2021 and 2025. This includes interviews with several of the main people involved in setting up the funding call, with funding officers, with researchers who got the funding and did the replication, and with original authors of the studies being replicated. It also includes observations of experiments, of handling data and texts in practice, and of discussions in workshops and conferences about the replication work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found that replicators across different fields started their endeavor with different assumptions, hopes, and goals. Much more surprising was that in the end the replicators, across disciplines, ran into very similar issues and problems with the replication work. Many also experienced added value in doing replication work in a very similar manner — albeit differently than what the funding call had originally assumed.

ABSTRACT. What is the 'rightful place of science'? This is continuously renegotiated, currently amid backlashes against sustainability efforts, rising post-democratic politics, and shifts in a geopolitical order deemed stable for three decades. Actors – from “radical” researchers, governmental bodies, the military, to (authoritarian) policymakers – are destabilising scientific practices, funding streams, and institutions. Science, in this context, is both object and instrument of political struggle: repeatedly and deeply politicised yet often framed as apolitical or neutral by those enacting its politicisation. While a rich literature engages with science politicisation, how politicisation unfolds in the context of ongoing renegotiations around science’s ‘rightful place’ remains underexamined. Appreciating politicisation of science as performance enables us to draw attention to what science is or ought to be, how politicisation is staged, by whom, to what end, how non-compliance with broader regimes or internal “norms of science” is policed. We advance a conceptual lens of science politicization as strategic performance based on a critical engagement with STS, political science, political sociology and performance literature. In this view, science and its institutions are inherently political and may at times become politicised, when their political character becomes visible, contested or strategically enacted. Politicisation, we contend, relies on the enactment of strategic performances, that we understand as producing social realities through contextualised interactions. Through these performances actors may polarise, challenge, or reshape science and its institutions, turning them into instruments or sites of politics. Science’s politicisation then inevitably serves to reimagine its ‘rightful place’, foregrounding questions of who gets to reimagine science and how that shapes the worlds we live in.

ABSTRACT. Pressing challenges, from the climate change to biodiversity loss and social inequalities, demand concerted efforts at the global scale. To address these challenges and drive transformative change, new knowledge and skills are needed. However, the scientific knowledge needed to address these challenges is produced and applied within a world shaped by political agendas and geographical realities. This paper explores the ways in which national institutions affect patterns of scientific knowledge production.

The ability of countries to diversify into innovative research activities and to develop new sustainable growth trajectories remains very unevenly distributed. Countries differ in their structural preconditions (including hard and soft institutions) and the capacity to engage in new knowledge domains. Many rules, norms, and values exist within a country, however dominant institutional logics determine which one shape scientific activity. Dominant logics are centered around economic competition, and regulatory institutions are designed to foster this.

In order to study the role of national institutions in scientific developments among fields of knowledge production addressing SDGs we focus on the period 2000-2021. Through descriptive analysis and statistical testing, we establish the various relationships between institutional contexts and scientific knowledge production.

There are stark disparities in how knowledge production is distributed geographically,— with a few countries contributing disproportionately to the global output. Overall, the data show diversification and expansion of scientific production, with especially rapid scaling in STEM domains. This shift underscores changing research priorities over the last two decades, shaped by global challenges. Scientific domains show distinct sensitivity to cultural, governance, and economic other institutional conditions. The results highlight how institutional contexts interact with epistemic cultures, where domains closer to societal structures (e.g., business, law, politics) are more strongly shaped by local institutional freedoms and cultural values, while fundamental sciences remain relatively more resilient to such variation.

ABSTRACT. We are currently amid an energy transition, which requires various technologies (e.g. renewables, hydrogen etc.). It has been recognized that such a transition is mineral intensive, yet the EU does not have adequate access to many of the critical raw materials (CRMs) needed for achieving its energy goals and targets. This has resulted in a series of tensions events and crises (e.g. Si crisis in PV) (1). Despite being first and foremost a political issue, raw materials geopolitics has been gaining traction in research programmes (e.g. EU, NL etc.), receiving significant funds (2). Given this entanglement, we can expect it to play an important role in the transformation of science and emerging technologies in the years to come. We are participating in NWO-funded projects aimed at designing materials and devices for solar PV and green hydrogen, in which we employ the methodological tools of Constructive Technology Assessment, to foster awareness among material scientists developing emerging energy technologies of two interlinked dimensions (i) raw material geopolitics and (ii) their externalities (i.e. health, social, environmental impacts). Including (regularly) such considerations into the research and design of materials and devices while they are in the making, could help to govern emerging energy technologies towards more responsible futures. At the same time, we are trying to remain reflexive, as STS scholars, as these dimensions can also be employed to boost nationalistic agendas and regimes. In our paper we will unpack some of the challenges we have faced, based on empirical findings, and propose possible ways to approach them.

(1) Hund et al., Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition, 2020. Regarding the EU see the corresponding Critical Raw Material Lists. (2) For example see the EC strategic projects and the new NWO-KIC call for proposals on reducing critical raw materials use in the energy transition.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary global crises—armed conflict, climate breakdown, authoritarian governance, and socio-technical restructuring—are increasingly mediated through urban infrastructures. Streets, housing systems, energy networks, digital surveillance technologies, and public spaces have become central sites where geopolitical power, scientific expertise, and technoscientific governance intersect. This paper argues that urban infrastructure constitutes a critical yet under-examined arena through which new forms of geopolitics are enacted and contested.

Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), political geography, and critical urban theory, the paper conceptualizes infrastructure not as a neutral or background system, but as an active technoscientific apparatus shaping political subjectivities, territorial control, and uneven distributions of vulnerability and care. In conflict-affected and crisis-prone cities, infrastructural systems function simultaneously as tools of securitization, exclusion, and governance, while also enabling forms of everyday resistance, repair, and alternative knowledge production.

Empirically, the paper mobilizes comparative insights from urban contexts across the Global North and South, including post-industrial and conflict-adjacent cities, to demonstrate how infrastructural decision-making—zoning regimes, housing technologies, digital monitoring, and public-space regulation—materializes geopolitical priorities at the scale of everyday life. These cases reveal how technoscientific expertise and planning knowledge are mobilized to legitimize exclusionary governance, often under the language of resilience, security, or modernization.

At the same time, the paper highlights counter-practices emerging from community-led spatial interventions, informal infrastructures, and civic repair initiatives that challenge dominant technopolitical regimes. These practices expose alternative epistemologies of infrastructure grounded in care, commons-based governance, and situated knowledge, complicating dominant narratives of innovation and progress.

Theoretically, the paper contributes to STS debates on geopolitics by foregrounding the urban as a key site where science, technology, and global power relations converge. It argues that geopolitical analysis must move beyond state-centric or macro-scale accounts to engage with the material and spatial infrastructures through which geopolitical orders are enacted and experienced. By reframing infrastructure as a technoscientific mediator of global justice, the paper calls for a more spatially attuned and ethically grounded STS approach to crisis governance.

ABSTRACT. Engaging with societal actors in direct co-production processes has been proposed as a desirable way for researchers to interact with society (Norström et al., 2020; Turnhout et al., 2020). Co-production is understood as the collaborative braiding-together of diverse knowledges by researchers and their collaborators (Chambers et al., 2021; Tengö et al., 2017). Although this way of collaborating ideally entails equitable decision-making and transformative outcomes, there are many challenges to co-production processes in practice (Turnhout et al., 2020; Chambers et al., 2022).

In response to these challenges, current co-production literature refers to the need to build trust and engage in continuous mutual learning, amongst other process-oriented factors (Djenontin & Meadow, 2018; Mach et al., 2020; Norström et al., 2020). But this understanding of co-production does not address how structural particularities of the involved actor groups influence the collaboration process.

Building on foundational work that characterizes distinct research communities (Kuhn, 1962; Knorr-Cetina, 1999) we propose repertoire theory (Ankeny & Leonelli, 2016, 2021) as a useful lens to analyze how the structural characteristics of actor groups influence the co-production between them. Repertoires are patterns of conceptual, material, and socio-economic elements that structure the activities of actor groups. In this contribution, we extend the use of repertoire theory from characterizing (change in) research communities to analyzing co-production processes, both between different research communities but also between scientists and societal stakeholders. We draw on participant observation and 30 interviews in two transdisciplinary plant breeding innovation projects in the Netherlands and Tanzania to show how (mis)aligning elements from existing repertoires can constrain or enable co-production processes between actors, leading to particular ways in which these elements are braided into newly emerging repertoires. Repertoire theory illuminates how structural elements influence co-production processes between actors, while these elements are also being altered and created in the process.

ABSTRACT. There is a substantial body of literature arguing that environmental sciences need to be transformed in order to produce “actionable,” or “relevant” knowledge for societal transformations (Pohl et al. 2017; Beier et al. 2017). According to Turnhout et al. (2020), much of this literature neglects the question of why co-production or transdisciplinarity often fail to deliver on their promises. To address this gap, the authors call for a (re-)politicization of co-production processes by enabling contestation over interests, perspectives, and knowledge claims—without reverting to expectations of science as a provider of universally “best” solutions. Continuing her line of work, Turnhout (2024) later suggests that “dominant environmental science has become an obstacle for transformative change”, serving the vested interests of capital and reinforcing colonial power relations constitute a “core foundation” of science (p. 2). While this account provides a powerful structural critique of certain science–society relations, at times it presents a totalizing view of scientific practice that obscures its fragmentation, internal contradictions, and persistent trade-offs (e.g., transparency vs. security, uncertainty vs. distrust). Such totalizing accounts, in turn, may foreclose opportunities for building transformative alliances and for fostering co-learning.

Building on Green’s (2020) distinction between Scientism and scientific research methods, and drawing on my recent experiences of facilitating a participatory modelling workshop, this paper explores what it means to pursue “better” environmental knowledge in practice: labouring connections by taking part in the messiness of (re)politicization. Inspired by Stengers’ (2023) work on 'making sense in common', as well as by contributions from Lave and Lane (2025) and Green (2022) that blur methodological boundaries between the biophysical and social sciences, I will further explore the stories and skills needed to support labouring such connections amid the messiness of openendedness, contestation, and uncertainty.

ABSTRACT. In line with developments to promote, incentivise, and mandate science-society interactions, questions about patient and public involvement (PPI) in medical-scientific studies have recently been included in the national application form of the Dutch medical research ethics review, nudging scientists to do PPI and gathering input for review. However, how it should be accounted for in ethics review remains rather ambiguous. Therefore, we studied how PPI practices are designed and performed, in relation to their effects, to improve our understanding of what makes PPI meaningful. We analysed the answers to the PPI questions in the ethics review application forms of 908 medical-scientific studies. From these 908 studies, a selected group of applicants was invited for an interview about their PPI practices (n=19). We employed Chilvers & Longhurst’s (2016) public engagement framework to perform a comparative analysis of the active construction of PPI objects (the issue framings and visions), subjects (the involved patients and publics), and the models (involvement technologies or procedural formats). This framework helps us to not assume their value as pregiven but explore variety in in- and exclusions of actors, issues, and visions, and how these relate to their context in the broader medical-scientific research system. Our preliminary findings indicate that scientists’ PPI visions and practices diverged in the level of actors’ influence, the depth of decisions, and forms of representation and contributions, shaped by the systemic context and complementing or transforming their studies. Despite this diversity, scientists tend to focus on who and what was included, bounded by their preconceived notions of issues and subjects, rarely acknowledging the resulting exclusions. To meaningfully account for PPI in ethics review, we argue that, instead of using a uniform standard, the inevitable partiality of all diverse modes of PPI should be recognized to reflect on their meaningfulness in particular circumstances.

ABSTRACT. In November 2025, journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril publishes "Are All LLMs the same ?", an article discussing his repeated querying of commercial Large Language Models to obtain a list of the most "significant" events in world history. Kayser-Bril stresses the high degree of similarity in the generated rankings (both as intra-model repetition and inter-model homogeneity), as well as the lack of diversity and the reinforcement of tacit cultural norms that such omissions convey. In the face of increased public reliance on LLMs as repositories of cultural knowledge, this project hopes to replicate this experiment in a way that enriches our understanding of this homogeneity in cultural answers by LLMs, and to ground it in two methodological developments: qualitative insight in the metrics of notability, and computational interpretability of the inner processes of LLMs.

Inspired by Michel-Rolph Trouillot's concept of active historical silences, we invert the experiment's original premise, focusing not on the most "notable" historical objects, but on long-tail / low-notability digital biographies featured on Wikipedia. First, we construct a dataset of "overlooked" notable individuals through a subselection of long-tail / low-notability digital biographies, on the basis of the platform's own metrics of notability (e.g. minimal cross-linguistic presence). We then test different LLMs using both neutral and contextualised prompts, and record both their outputs and log probabilities to assess the degree of confidence or perceived self-evidence of each completion. These explainability tasks serve as "cultural probes", exposing the different models' familiarity with historical figures, and how they plan and justify their responses.

By investigating the repeating patterns and (dys)functioning of LLMs when queried for marginalized individuals and identities, this work hopes to constitute a study in agnotology, evidencing the ways that generative mechanisms may reify and consolidate omissions and skewing of the global cultural memories grounded in digital archives.

ABSTRACT. The gradual arrival on the relevance of the concept of ‘culture’ on behalf of commercial and academic researchers of 21st century AI (and their social-scientific and humanistic commentators) could be said to be an inevitability and direct consequence of the recent attention to ‘language’ in the wake of the widespread popularity of dialogically-oriented LLMs such as ChatGPT. Specifically, LLMs have acted as a material “existence proof” of a theory of utterance generation largely at odds with the rule-based and syntax-centric perspectives of Chomsky-influenced theories and other computational models of human language (Piantadosi 2023), and showed that the “bias” already observed in ML-based training methods could be reproduced in practically infinite ways, all within inscrutable high-dimensional, contextual, and indeed multimodal representations of meaning (Farrell et al. 2025). The true complexity of interactional language use, in all of its semiotic modalities, was now a daily reality for AI researchers; and critical disciplines which had already passed through their “linguistic turn” found themselves suddenly lacking in topical relevance (Weatherby 2025). Whatever ‘culture(s)’ may be, I argue that we must respect the linguistic anthropologists who — in the wake of Boas, Jakobson, and others — recognized that any culture’s participants “actualize their groupness through interaction, principally, discursive interaction” (Silverstein 2006), and that one cannot speak of culture without (properly semiotically-grounded) language in/as social action.

But in deep learning, with its high-dimensional, multi-layered transductions and representations of meaning, the messy ‘culture’ concept — notoriously “beset with ambiguity and vagueness” (Lizardo 2016) — has finally met a computational formalization befit to describe it. That is to say, it is only with multilingual LLMs that the polyvalent and only sometimes-overlapping relational uses of the lexical term ‘culture’ and approximate equivalents across various languages and dialects can be directly explored — albeit via methods which are only presently emerging (Amiesen et al. 2025). Our intuitions, for example, that the semiotically-grounded and interactionally-nuanced concept of ‘culture’ in American linguistic anthropology is frequently only distantly related to the indexically-naïve and arts-centric concept of ‘culture’ in British anthropology (and is, e.g. more closely related to interactional and structuralist conceptions of culture in American and French sociology) can, in principle, be increasingly empirically explored via the high-dimensional token representations which unfold through the layers of an LLM encoder. By taking the concept(s) of ‘culture’ as an exemplary object of study, I will illustrate how the concept’s controversiality and differing structural relations across languages and disciplines can be explored with existing open-weight models.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how AI memes materialise the unstable metaphorical language that underpins public discourse about artificial intelligence. While debates about AI often appear technical, they are driven by shifting figurations - AI as brain, partner, threat, joke, or oracle - that remain largely unexamined. The problem addressed here is how these metaphors structure the contemporary deep-learning hype bubble and how their breakdown becomes visible in everyday cultural production.

Methodologically, the study combines qualitative close reading of 84 AI-related memes with affinity diagramming to identify recurring narrative patterns and metaphor clusters. This approach reveals how memes function as micro-texts through which collective sense-making about AI is performed.

Findings show that AI memes are rarely “about” AI itself; instead, they expose the metaphor work used to make AI intelligible. Memes repeatedly transform AI into bubbles, chaotic interns, monsters, lovers, and scam machines. The humor emerges when these metaphors collapse - when neural networks stop resembling “brains”, when the fantasy of AI as creative partner is punctured by hardware, or when superintelligence is reduced to petty gossip.

The paper concludes that AI memes reveal deep cultural frictions within AI discourse, demonstrating that public debates about AI are ultimately debates about the stories used to describe it.

ABSTRACT. In Finland, green hydrogen has rapidly become embedded in national visions of future sustainability, competitiveness, and energy sovereignty. This paper examines how hydrogen is imagined as an “only salvation” capable of securing multiple societal goals at once, and how these imaginaries acquire spatial form. Emerging hydrogen plans and narratives point to the western regions of Finland as islands of anticipated prosperity, where investment, infrastructure, and institutional attention converge, while eastern regions increasingly appear as islands of abandonment—spaces that are marginal to the dominant hydrogen future yet still implicated in its national framing. Rather than evaluating outcomes, the paper focuses on the performative role of hydrogen imaginaries in shaping expectations, priorities, and regional roles before large-scale deployment has occurred. By attending to absence as much as presence, the paper uses Qualitative Case Analysis to highlight how early-stage energy imaginaries stabilize certain futures while rendering others less visible or less thinkable. The Finnish hydrogen case thus offers insight into how sociotechnical imaginaries operate in formative moments of energy transitions, structuring territorial belonging, hope, and anticipation long before technologies fully materialize.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Magallanes (southern Chile), this presentation examines the normative and political frictions that underpin the anticipation of green hydrogen (GH2) and discusses some alternatives to pluralise green hydrogen futures. We first describe how GH2 futures in Magallanes are enacted through different modalities of anticipation. Three key modalities of anticipation are described: the first involves performances that stage the value and desirability of GH2. We describe how technology fairs, pilot projects, and demonstrations are central to highlight the imminence of GH2. The second concerns the creation of anticipatory narratives around the viability and value of GH2. We explore how these narratives are constructed and used in public documents and discourses to justify GH2 imminence. The third modality involves the spatialisation of the potential economic value of GH2 using maps and representations. We show how these modalities of anticipation reveal a particular politics of GH2 futures, marked by the dominance of planetary-scale technoeconomic interventions and the entanglement of mitigation and economic profit. In doing so, we argue that this type of ecomodernist energy future marginalises alternative pathways for the energy transition and makes it challenging to problematise the various normative and political frictions at play in the deployment of GH2. The presentation closes by reflecting on how STS-oriented research on GH2 futures could help pluralise existing visions of energy futures by producing alternative modes of anticipation. To do so, we explore the potential of manufacturing alternative modes of anticipation, such as (counter) narratives and (counter) mapping that highlight the fragility and complexities of GH2 and foreground the normative frictions involved in its development. This is illustrated by presenting some preliminary work that explores the production of counter-representations of green hydrogen futures through (counter) participatory mapping of green hydrogen projects with local actors in Magallanes.

ABSTRACT. Hydrogen futures play a critical role in modern-day energy transitions. Yet, they are often shaped by reductionist assumptions about society and the stability of its normative demands. They tend to reproduce incumbent normative priorities onto transitions and often leave little room for normative contestation, rendering hydrogen futures vulnerable [1]. Building on prior research that conceptualises humility as a more resilient response to normative uncertainties arising from value conflict, value incommensurability, value change, and moral uncertainty, this paper investigates whether participatory scenario planning can enable humbler engagement with hydrogen futures [2,3].

Participatory scenario planning has been identified as a promising technology of humility in energy transitions [4,5,6], yet it has not yet been applied to hydrogen transitions. Unlike approaches that converge on preferred pathways or aim to validate and reinforce dominant hydrogen imaginaries, participatory scenario planning foregrounds inclusiveness, contingency, and divergence. It enables participation in the construction and interpretation of futures. It allows for generating, contrasting, and scrutinising a wider range of possible futures, rather than focusing solely on those deemed plausible or probable, and as such it resists instrumental reduction of uncertainty and explicitly accommodates pluralism. Lastly, it also allows for including both diverse value dynamics and how governance may respond to these.

The main research question is: To what extent can participatory scenario planning facilitate humble engagement with normative uncertainty in hydrogen transitions? Through a series of pilot multi-actor workshops, including non-dominant and non-expert participants, we will co-produce and reflect on a set of normatively diverse and dynamically evolving hydrogen futures, explicitly attending to normative uncertainties, exclusions, and foreclosed alternatives. The study contributes to hydrogen scholarship by advancing a methodological approach for engaging with normative uncertainty in futures-oriented governance.

References 1. Taebi, B., J. H. Kwakkel and C. Kermisch. “Governing climate risks in the face of normative uncertainties.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 11(5) (2020): e666. 2. Jasanoff, S. (2003). Technologies of humility: Citizen participation in governing science. Minerva, 41(3), 223-244. 3. Jasanoff, S. (2018). Just transitions: A humble approach to global energy futures . Energy Research & Social Science, 35, 11-14. 4. Comi, A., Mosca, L., & Whyte, J. (2025). Future making as emancipatory inquiry: A value‐based exploration of desirable futures. Journal of Management Studies, 62, 2467-2481. 5. Melin, A., Magnusdottir, G. L., & Baard, P. (2024). Participatory-Deliberative Ethics Assessments of Energy Scenarios: What Can They Achieve and How Should They be Designed? Ethics, Policy & Environment, 1-21. 6. Nelson, R., Pearce, B., Warnier, M., & Verma, T. (2025). Constructing just mobility futures. Futures, 103698.

ABSTRACT. The practices and implications of technological hypes have come under increased scrutiny in recent years, particularly due to their growing influence on innovation agendas and public discourses. This has led to the emergence of the nascent field of hype studies, bringing together scholars of various disciplines with interest in dynamics and implications of hypes.

A core challenge in hype studies is the nuanced description of hype’s components, dynamics, relevant actors, and consequences. This leads us to examine the following research question: How do technology hypes arise and take effect through economic, media, social, political, technical and cultural dynamics?

Drawing upon an extensive literature review on hypes and related concepts from across a wide range of disciplines, including STS, sociology of expectations, and innovation studies, we propose a new qualitative model for analysing technology hypes. To do so, we apply a systems thinking perspective to analyse existing models. Here, we focus on conceptualizations such as purpose, elements, interconnections, feedback loops, and mental models. We further analyse each model’s actors, expectations, narratives, and normativity. The resulting model provides a novel approach to extend STS’ existing approaches and contributes to its interdisciplinarity.

Considering hype studies are inherently interdisciplinary and its results often fragmented, our model closes a critical research gap by integrating various disciplinary models into one coherent model applicable to the various disciplines concerned with the phenomenon of technology hype. To illustrate our model, we apply it to three technology use cases - AI agents, cryptocurrency, and bidirectional brain-machine interfaces - to test its validity and highlight its usefulness for researchers and policy-makers.

ABSTRACT. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, public discourse on menopause went through a marked change. Not because the topic was taboo and became less so, but because the conception of menopause changed during this time. In medical journals, the conception of menopause moved from a natural life phase, characterized by a few (potential) complaints, to a drastic reduction in valuable hormones characterized by risk and the need for prevention of long term health effects. The information and advice doctors’ provided in women’s magazines and in books aimed at lay audiences largely ran parallel to the discourse in medical journals. In the 1950s and 1960s, advice had focused on behaviour and attitude, while simultaneously emphasizing that most women had no complaints whatsoever during their ‘transition’. Uniquely, while other countries such as the United States and Germany focused strongly on hormone replacement therapy, Dutch doctors were hesitant, and reluctant to advise hormone therapy as a treatment option. First in the 1970s, the focus shifted to ‘psychosocial’ circumstances during menopause, followed in the 1980s with a focus on the potential risk factors associated with menopause such as osteoporosis and cardiovascular diseases. At the same time, patient activist and feminist groups influenced the discourse on menopause as well. This raises the question how these changes relate to the attitude towards hormone therapy as a menopause treatment. How did these attitudes change from the 1950s to the 1990s, and how is that related to the conception of menopause, femininity , and the social and cultural authority of Dutch doctors? Method: historical method, using published historical sources (medical journals, women’s magazines).

ABSTRACT. Socio-technical change and transformation in modern societies are complex interplays of self-organization and political steering (intentions) – with clear cause-impact relations often hard to identify. However, transformation and change are not purely self-evolving and emergent, but develop under a shadow of strong or weak government hierarchy. As the complexity and interdependence of socio-technical systems deepen, so too does the need for governance approaches capable of anticipating and managing change over extended time horizons. Long-Term Governance as a conceptual framework has been developed to contour long-term socio-technical transformation and change in the field of tensions between self-organisation and target-oriented steering approaches. Long-term governance embraces broad policy orientation that embeds foresight, institutional resilience, and adaptive capacity into decision-making over decades, often under conditions of ambiguous problem framings and shifting normative commitments. Within this presentation, we take a closer look on a specific socio-technical transformation case, namely the case of waste-to-energy. Taking the example of waste incineration as one of the main pillars of waste management in Germany, we trace and analyse transformation developments, pressures and possible future alignments in this sector and policy field. We empirically examine these dynamics through a qualitative case study of waste-to-energy infrastructures, focusing on the European governance framework and its implementation at the national and local levels in Germany. As a basis for analysing waste transformation, we develop and apply the approach of governance regime comparison frictions. Socio-technical transformation and change is interpreted as a consequence of frictions between existing, competing and interacting differing long-term governance regimes. Governance regimes are institutionalized arrangements composed of actors, rules, visions, and policy instruments. These regimes are structured by long-term normative objectives (e.g. sustainability, decarbonization), temporal commitments (e.g. 2030 or 2050 targets), and distinctive policy tools. Yet in practice, governance rarely unfolds within neatly bounded regimes. In infrastructure-intensive sectors such as energy, mobility, waste management, multiple long-term governance regimes often converge on the same socio-technical systems. Their interaction produces hybrid governance configurations, spaces where divergent long-term agendas, institutional logics, and policy instruments co-exist and interact. This coexistence can generate institutional friction: patterned tensions, misalignments, and contradictions that arise when overlapping regimes advance incompatible goals, timelines, or instruments. Taking the case of waste-to-energy, the sector has been situated at the intersection of three overlapping long-term governance regimes: waste management, circular economy, and climate mitigation and pollution control. The circular economy discourse has reframed waste as a resource, challenging the legitimacy of waste-to-energy by emphasizing material recovery, waste prevention, and closed-loop systems, aiming at minimizing residual waste volumes. At the same time, climate mitigation has intensified scrutiny of incineration-related emissions, questioning the role of waste-to-energy in decarbonization pathways. Waste-to-energy’s institutional triangulation makes it an exemplary site for exploring how hybrid governance configurations manifest in practice, how actors manage frictions, and how infrastructures evolve under conflicting long-term demands – in short: how socio-technical transformations evolve.

ABSTRACT. Decarbonising transportation is seen as a crucial factor for mitigating the effects of climate change. Sustainability transitions in the mobility sector are increasingly shaped by collective visions articulated through policy strategies and future-oriented narratives. While such futures are often framed as inclusive and enabling, this paper argues that they function as sites of political contestation in which participation and alienation are co-produced.

Drawing upon Marres’ theory of material participation, the paper conceptualises the electric vehicle (EV) as a conduit through which participation in mobility futures is enacted. Rather than constituting futures in isolation, the EV’s role in future-making is mediated through governance instruments that organise how publics engage with the material artefact. Mobility futures embedded in policy may thus empower existing well-resourced, geographically central collectives, while marginalising future imaginaries associated with publics whose mobility needs are differently configured.

By foregrounding policy-making as a key site of future formation, this paper shows how the incremental nature of governance reinforces dominant EV-centred mobility futures. It analyses three distinct modes of material participation enabled by governance instruments – financial incentives, charging infrastructure and regulation. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how these instruments structure performativity between EV users and those excluded from participation, producing emergent forms of peripheralisation.

ABSTRACT. The significant environmental footprint of the global shipping industry requires innovative solutions that reduce the sector's environmental impact. This goal is in line with the International Maritime Organisation's (IMO) ambition to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050. A single cruise ship employs around 1500 cabins accounting for high environmental impacts through energy demand, components and materials entering the life cycle. In response, the BMWE-funded research project ReCab focuses on introducing circularity/cradle-to-cradle concepts, aiming at minimized resource consumption and waste generation. Appropriate cabin designs and data processing facilitate recycling and enable the reuse in non-shipping contexts. The long-term goal is to create a scalable approach that can account for wider industry adoption. In prerequisite for developing an adequate cabin concept, different aspects have to be considered ranging from environmental, economic and to social dimensions of sustainability. The project focuses on the multidimensional assessment of the cabin’s sustainability throughout the entire life cycle including its end-of-life. This analysis combines mixed-method approaches, including Science and Technology Studies (STS) methodologies and stakeholder engagement, to contextualize quantitative results and design decisions. By addressing individuals' usage behavior, potential adoption barriers, technology use, and social actors' understanding of sustainability, a comprehensive insight into sustainable cabin design is provided. The presentation showcases how the project combines a co-design, mixed-method approach, and the integration of the results into Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to evaluate and compare alternatives by quantifying and weighting criteria to aid transparent, evidence-based decision-making. The advantages and disadvantages of this approach will be highlighted while real examples from transdisciplinary research practice are shown.

ABSTRACT. Cities worldwide are adopting automated urban surveillance systems, reportedly for increased safety. Many such systems come with manually activated buttons, for example, the automated surveillance system for the Bengaluru Safe City Project in India. However, these buttons remain understudied as part of the larger automated systems. Focusing on the discourses around such analogue physical artefacts and their spatial embedding in a city where automated technologies are being hyped can offer rich insights into the city’s collective imaginaries (Kasper and Schramm, 2023). Such discourses are often reflected in the news media, including newspapers (Raynor et al., 2017). In light of this, we ask, “How are panic buttons framed in Indian newspapers?” By posing this question, we explore the collective imaginaries involving these buttons and their expected role in urban safety initiatives in the Indian context. We adopt a frame analysis approach and employ an abductive coding strategy. Our analysis reveals three distinct news framings: i) panic buttons need to be where crime has occurred, ii) panic buttons should cause spatially dispersed chain reactions, and iii) panic buttons are useful because they are simple. Conceptually, these findings show how safety-related urban sociotechnical transitions flow from geographies of fear to geographies of hope via urban technocracy.

ABSTRACT. Digital platforms have become important sites of cultural production, visibility, and labour, yet later life remains marginal in research on platform participation. This paper examines how older adults engage with social media platforms as content creators, focusing on TikTok as a socio-technical environment shaped by visibility regimes, norms of authenticity, and platform economies.

The paper draws on an ongoing mixed-methods study combining platform data analysis with qualitative interviews with older content creators. Rather than approaching digital engagement in later life primarily through questions of skills or adoption, the analysis situates older creators within broader platform structures that shape opportunities for visibility, recognition, and participation.

The study explores how older TikTok creators construct public personas, how they interpret audience feedback and platform affordances, and how content creation relates to experiences of work, agency, and social participation in later life. Particular attention is paid to the ways age and gender intersect with platform dynamics, potentially shaping uneven forms of visibility and valuation.

By foregrounding ageing as an analytical category within platform studies, this paper contributes to STS discussions on technology as social infrastructure and on how power is enacted in everyday digital practices. It argues that examining later-life participation can open up new questions about inclusion, cultural labour, and the organisation of digital platforms beyond normative working-age assumptions.

ABSTRACT. Seed enclosures, driven by intellectual property regimes, legal frameworks and the monopoly of industrial agriculture, have led to the rise in seed activism and the growing call for seed sovereignty. In working towards seed sovereignty, practitioners have been establishing seed commons. Associated with a critique of the commodification and enclosure of plant genetic resources and the governance of knowledge surrounding seeds, seed activists use the language of the commons, but there remains a lack of consensus on how to enact a seed commons, especially regarding ownership, management, and accessibility. How do indigenous and local communities use seeds to resist colonial erasure, past and present? How do seeds hold the power to bring forth unanticipated and negated futures? How do seeds defy commons categories? Through a multi-sited ethnography, I will contribute to the theoretical and practical understanding of a seed commons. This research project explores seeds as sites of epistemic reclamation by local and indigenous communities and as sites of generative dissent (Hernandez Vidal and Moore, 2022).

ABSTRACT. Since the 1970s, a number of so-called ‘City Farms’ have popped up in London (as well as other cities within and outside the UK). The term refers to community-based projects, which make use of neglected or abandoned spaces within the city and seek to bring urban dwellers into contact with agricultural practices and animals. Unlike commercial farms, they offer farming as a service to the urban 'community', for example, by providing a space for weekend outings, children's play, volunteering, or therapeutic and educational activities. In doing so, these initiatives simultaneously promise to reconfigure urban spaces, urban communities, and practices of food production. Thus, as we want to show here, they function as spaces in which urban-rural relations, and indeed the very categories of “the city” and “the countryside” that underpin them, are reworked and negotiated.

We present a historical-sociological study that traces the emergence of London’s city farms as a historically situated process of practice formation. Focusing especially on the period of the 1970s to the 1990s, which saw the emergence and consolidation of several city farm projects in London, we draw on archival materials and some oral history interviews with key actors related to specific city farm projects and the broader city farm ‘movement’ that connects these disparate local practices. Against this backdrop, we seek to understand in our presentation how authentic experiences of a “countryside atmosphere” are cultivated and choreographed in these city farm projects, for the benefit of local urban publics. In doing so, we ask how notions of cities and countrysides, of urban communities and rural experiences, are constructed alongside ideas of a “good childhood” and a “good life” in the city, and how these processes help to reconfigure urban-rural relations.

ABSTRACT. The energy sector is transforming towards increasingly digitalised, automated, decentralised and data-driven energy infrastructures with novel alternative ways of producing, consuming and managing energy, bringing forth new roles and constellations of actors. Therefore, the implementation of digitalised energy technologies, such as local energy management systems, can be understood as challenging and disruptive actions towards innovation (Dütschke & Wesche 2018; Schmidt-Scheele & Mattes 2025). In order to understand such ongoing transition processes, we need to investigate how relationships, dependencies and practices between actors are directly influencing technology development and implementation. For this, our paper provides a conceptual approach which combines an understanding of socio-technical configurations of actors with a comprehensive analysis of the power dynamics which are situated within such configurations. To analyse the inseparable and intertwined character of constellations of actors and the existing and changing power dynamics between them, we employ the concept of scripts (Akrich 1992; Akrich & Latour 1992), investigating processes of in-scription and de-scription in the development of technological artefacts (Schmidt-Scheele & Mattes 2025). By using a horizontal and relational conception of power relations between actors, building upon approaches highlighting the transformative characteristics of power (De Geus, Avelino et. al 2023; Avelino 2017), we provide a framework which is centred around the agency of actors to challenge, change, renew or re-configure infrastructures which surround them. How power relations are then inscribed within technological artefacts creating forms of agency for actors thereby becomes the key factor for realising actions of transformative change. By combining scripts, socio-technical-ecological configurations and power relations, this paper contributes to the body of literature on the multifaceted and dynamic character of actor constellations within sustainability transitions. To illustrate the applicability of our conceptual framework, we provide insights from an ongoing case study on energy management systems and energy household indicators in local neighbourhoods.

ABSTRACT. In September 2025 Kathmandu, Nepal, saw violent protests, leaving 79 killed and over a 1,000 injured, as a reaction to a nationwide ban of 26 social media platforms. The government’s reason for the ban was that e-service providers did not comply with a newly instated rule that required a digital tax to be paid. Many Nepalese believed that it was an attempt by the government to silence critique on long-lasting corruption, nepotism and lack of transparency in its political sphere. Throughout 2025 a new trend hit Nepal: “Nepo Z”. Increasing amounts of social media content from “nepo babies” (Baskar, 2025), children of wealthy government officials, showing of their luxury lifestyles caused. It is not surprising that Gen Z found each other in online spaces (Rauniyar, 2025), which they used as an outlet to express outrage, build solidarity, and speak freely.

Although the platform was banned, through VPN-connections, Discord groups were set up to communicate about opposing the ban (Szadkowski et al., 2025). These groups grew rapidly, involving tens of thousands of people. They were the epicenter of organizing a, peaceful and permitted, demonstration. As stated by Human Rights Watch (2025), on the 8th of September people gathered at Maitighar Mandala, the typical point of assembly for protests in Kathmandu, to march 400 meters up to a police barricade close to the parliament. Once arrived at the barricade police forces realized they had underestimated the volume of the protest. Thousands of people, mostly Gen Z, had shown up on their doorstep. Protesters toppled the police barricade and started running towards the parliament building. This is when the violence started and the protest turned into a political riot.

Demonstrations and protests, both non-violent and violent, do not reflect a single instance of oppression but, rather, structural and long-term societal oppression that stems from corruption, discrimination, and biased bureaucratic (governmental) processes. The question whether protests can be justified when they turn violent is an important one for understanding the boundaries of (deliberative) democracies. This article explores the impact of technological development on the speed of organizing collective democratic protests and its effect on democratic boundaries.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this research is to examine and explore the role of science and new metrics in the assetization of food products. By employing a critical approach to standardization and certification processes, it investigates how technosciences and cognitive materialities contribute to establishing new value chains with local or territorial implications. Specifically, the paper argues that in a period of crisis for the agrifood regime in Greece, an emerging community of scientists, comprised by biologists, chemists, biochemists, toxicologists and agronomists, promotes scientization of food as the remedy for the reconfiguration of Greek products in the global markets. The paper assesses the formation of added value (valorization) and the construction of assets that redefine the significance of food products. It examines the process of assetization as the development of new ontologies of food products, influenced by knowledge, politics, expertise and regional development policies.

The key research questions of the paper are: 1. How have knowledge and techno-scientific politics influenced valorization processes in food production, and what is their impact on agrifood transitions? 2. How are standards and certifications co-produced with new sociotechnical imaginaries of regional and national development?

In this context the paper explores how omic technologies, specifically within the framework of the FoodOmicsGR national research infrastructure, contribute to these certification processes by producing scientific evidence, enabling traceability and reinforcing claims of authenticity and distinctiveness of food products. We argue that the emergence of omic technologies is co-produced with new visions about the quality and health benefits of agrifood products, and the new entrepreneurial and policy roles of scientific networks within the national agrifood system. The paper is based on the collection of qualitative data through interviews with scientists and experts and the analysis of media content related to the FoodOmicsGR initiative, interpreted through Critical Discourse Analysis and Frame Analysis.

ABSTRACT. Coproductionist studies of participation show that how interactions between scientists and non-scientists happen tend to produce the issues, publics, and models of democracy associated with participatory practices. Analytically, this observation conflates the epistemic commitments that govern science with the political commitments that govern participation. In consequence, one can expect tensions to arise in how participation is done in practice. While coproductionist research on participation has been focusing on the political consequences of participation formats, I highlight the epistemic effects of participation by asking how participation demands become actualised in scientific practices. To do so, I build on the work of Marres and Stark to conceptualise the articulation of public demands as 'testing' scientists' epistemic routines and attachments. This broadens the analysis to diverse kinds of participation, including critical expressions directed at science through protests or deliberate involvement in formalised participatory settings. In this presentation, I put this notion to work through different empirical illustrations, showing how scientists' epistemic attachments come to bear in different participatory situations and what strategies they employ in response. ‘Testing’, I argue, invites empirical explorations of participatory interaction and surfaces questions about the implied causal relationship between 'more participation' and 'more democracy' in view of sciences’ epistemic commitments, such as normative questions about what 'good participation' looks like.

ABSTRACT. STS scholarship has a long tradition of critiquing technocracy by challenging the dominance of technical expertise in policymaking and advocating for wider societal participation. Existing STS scholarship that analyses the formation of alliances between scientists and other societal actors, however, often foregrounds human actors’ ability to form these alliances, leaving out the crucial roles non-human entities can play. Examples include Callon’s dialogic democracy or Jasanoff’s technologies of humility. This study explores the role of non-human entities in assembling networks of scientific experts, concerned groups and non-human actors by answering the question: How can policies be science-driven without resorting to technocratic governance?

This study draws on Bruno Latour’s notion of Dingpolitik to examine how nonhuman entities can contribute to the formation of political collectives and open up issues to be discussed by a wide variety of stakeholders and not just scientists. The ding, refers both to the inclusion of things in political theory and to an assembly, a meaning echoed in the names of Scandinavian parliamentary buildings (Storting, Alting, Folketing). In other words: the notion of ding draws attention to both the act of assembling as well as to the issue that is to be concerned. Dingpolitik holds a democratic promise as it presents issues not as facts to be discussed only by scientists but as a ding that gathers scientists, concerned groups and non-human actors. Combining interviews with documentary analysis, this study draws on an empirical case of steel slag contamination in the Netherlands. The slag, a by-product in steel production, is presented as a ding. It is argued that the steel slag is not just an object of scientific research, but a non-human political actor. By affecting and distressing concerned residents, inspectors, scientists, and politicians, the slag assembles a wide variety of stakeholders around it.

ABSTRACT. Astronomers build telescopes in remote places to get the best views of the sky. Already since the 1970s, communities living close to telescope sites have raised protests about e.g. the environmental impact of these telescopes and the ways these sites are appropriated by astronomers without consent of local people. These protests, visible in various ways, have happened for example against observatories on Mauna Kea (Hawai’i), Kitt Peak and Mt. Graham (Arizona). In response, some astronomers want to move from ‘deficit to dialogue’ and include local communities in their telescope development. However, it is not straightforward to change the way astronomers interact with citizens, because it is not part of their research culture to include non-scientific stakeholders at early stages of telescope development. In this presentation, we focus on the Africa Millimetre Telescope (AMT), a radio telescope that will be built in Namibia. In order to ‘prevent’ societal upheaval, astronomers want to include Namibian communities as dialogue partners in the telescope development. We conducted 28 interviews among astronomers of the AMT and Namibians who are (in)directly involved in the AMT project. By employing the lens of ‘material participation’ (Marres, 2012) we aimed to compare the values, interests and concerns of both groups in relation to telescopes and telescope sites. We found, amongst others, that AMT astronomers under the heading of ‘dialogue’ primarily envisioned the new telescope as means to contribute to education and capacity building in Namibia. In addition, the telescope itself is seen by AMT astronomers as a potential symbol for North-South collaboration, and by Namibian respondents as a symbol for scientific and technological progress in the country. Finally, the telescope site itself has an important role in who is seen as a relevant dialogue partner.

ABSTRACT. Across social media, users engage in iterative prompting trends that push generative models beyond their expected outputs—trends like “make it more” or “create the exact replica 74 times.” In these experiments, the same prompt is used to generate a new image from the last, producing long visual chains where meaning slowly drifts. Such sequences often go viral as evidence of “AI glitches”--moments when the model seems to cross boundaries-- such as turning a white woman into a Black man, or muscular biceps into a croissant. They captivate precisely because they appear to reveal a breakdown in the model’s logic. This work will argue, however, that these boundary crossings are not breakdowns but interpretative openings that expose the internal coherence of latent space. They make visible the friction between human and machinic epistemologies: while human meaning depends on categorical difference—taxonomical, oppositional, and historically shaped by hierarchies of identity—machine reasoning unfolds through gradients of statistical proximity. When a model drifts from one category to another, it does not violate a boundary but moves along a smooth topology of resemblance. The “boundary” arises only in human interpretation, where categorical expectation collides with gradient reasoning. Iteration lies at the core of understanding these encounters. Using iterative image generation as both phenomenon and method, the work will examine how boundaries and their transgressions emerge only at the interface between human and machinic sense-making. The framework of forensic iteration approaches these moments as acts of epistemic translation, where two modes of reasoning briefly converge. In viral prompting trends, users repeatedly adjust prompts to probe how a model “understands” concepts, performing a lay form of model interrogation. This practice mirrors computational explainability methods such as neuron activation maximization, where researchers iteratively modify inputs to reveal the features that activate particular neurons.  Both enact iteration as a tool of boundary crossing: a way to surface what is otherwise latent, to map the contours of meaning as it emerges through gradients rather than categories. By tracing how iteration bridges cultural practice and technical explainability, the paper repositions so-called “AI glitches” as productive sites for theorizing boundary, meaning, and the interpretative space between taxonomy and gradient.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies technologies and epistemic cultures introduced with the growing prominence of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in search engines. Features like Google’s AI Overviews are slowly reconfiguring not only how search engines operate, but also thought of and used. What are the new epistemic cultures of these systems? What is different compared to earlier algorithmic rankings, which already used deep learning techniques? And how does RAG broadly affect a culture of search? I first document how with RAG, retrieval logics no longer act just on a document level but also on a paragraph and even sentence level. While ‘list-making’ through authority metrics remains important, generativity is layered on top as a central organizing principle. The result is a move away from interested rankings (Rieder 2021) towards a more fuzzy patchwork of generated texts that partially emerge from a language model and partially from indexed documents. I frame this as RAG’s logic of loose citation over pure ranking as diverse snippets from a variety of sources are compiled into one unified result. I then empirically interrogate the ‘epistemic culture’ (Knorr Cetina 1999) of Google AI overviews using a study on how Dutch party websites are ‘cited’ in the context of the 2025 national elections in The Netherlands. Most notably, I find that a significant number of cases where the source text contains loosely related or unrelated language compared to the generated text. This source obfuscation–does the text emerge from the model or database?–means that RAG practice of ‘citing’ can be loose and opaque, closer to ‘association’ than ‘refencing’. Yet successful nudging or ‘manipulation’ of RAG texts through Generative Engine Optimization comes along with rhetorics of neutrality and balance compared to the more transparent partisan authorship that is visible from a list of domain names. I argue that knowledge as such gets ‘dislocated’ from lists of sources towards multi-sourced generated text, raising uncertainty on information opacity and partisanship.

ABSTRACT. As large language models (LLMs) become integrated into everyday communication, they increasingly participate in the mediation of culturally and morally sensitive public discourse. While these systems are commonly presented as neutral assistants, their responses are shaped by safety architectures, training data, and embedded cultural assumptions. Our research asks: how do LLMs engage with sensitive social issues when confronted with different discursive positions, and what forms of normative governance emerge through these interactions?

We approach LLMs not as passive technologies but as communicative actors that perform boundary-work by adjusting tone, moral framing, and explanatory depth in response to perceived interlocutors. Empirically, we examine antisemitism as a paradigmatic case of moral sensitivity, historical contestation, and cultural tension. Rather than relying on demographic categories, we construct synthetic conversational personas that represent distinct discourse styles - hesitant uncertainty, inherited stereotypes, casual conspiratorial talk, and explicit rejectionist narratives. Identical prompts are submitted across personas, alongside a control condition without contextual cues.

Our study employs a comparative prompt-based design combined with mixed-method text analysis. Semantic embedding similarity is used to trace how core themes are reframed across interactions, while sentiment and affective profiling capture shifts in emotional posture and moral urgency. Safety and toxicity classifiers identify moments of refusal, redirection, or disengagement, complemented by qualitative coding of recurring rhetorical strategies such as pedagogical explanation, moral warning, civic framing, and procedural withdrawal.

Our findings show that LLMs respond in patterned yet differentiated ways, enacting forms of normative mediation that vary with perceived user positioning. These responses reveal how deep learning systems actively shape cultural meaning and moral order, translating ethical constraints and institutional expectations into everyday conversational governance.

ABSTRACT. Governments and industry sectors place a transition towards a renewable hydrogen economy at the centre of their decarbonization strategies, promoting hydrogen futures as an integral part of the transformation different industry sectors. Such futures and the sociotechnical transitions that facilitate them carry normative directions that are in part shaped by research agendas, research programming, and research practices.

Directionality is a central concept in sociotechnical transitions literature and mission-oriented innovation policy. Directionality can be described as normative direction of transformative change processes in sociotechnical systems. However, we have insufficient insights in the practices and dynamics through which research-related activities shape directionality.

Focusing on Dutch hydrogen research, we approach directionality as a process, and study the normative dimensions that are currently (not) being considered in this process. We have used just transitions as a normative framework and analysed policy documents as well as 6 four-hour transdisciplinary focus groups to examine the practices and dynamics that shape the normative direction of hydrogen research and consequently, hydrogen futures.

We show how epistemological and institutional arrangements, power and influence structures, problem framing and policy arenas channel attention towards particular solution pathways while marginalising others, coproducing directionality of Dutch hydrogen research. Drawing on these insights, we outline research governance strategies for directing hydrogen research towards more just hydrogen futures.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the technopolitics of environmental making by examining how the EU Hydrogen Strategy (COM/2020/301) is imagining a European market for hydrogen. With the hydrogen strategy, the EU aimed to develop a market for renewable and low-carbon hydrogen as a way to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors. The strategy set ambitious targets for hydrogen production and import, outlined measures to stimulate both supply and demand of low-carbon hydrogen, develop infrastructure, provide regulation for a competitive market, and included the introduction price-support mechanisms. With (low-carbon) hydrogen markets still practically non-existent in Europe, the strategy can be considered a striking case of environmental market making: the creation of markets as a means to address environmental concerns (Doganova and Laurent 2019). Besides dislocating the relationship between markets and politics, environmental market making schemes like the hydrogen strategy also introduce a host of technopolitical concerns owing to the technological nature of environmental governance. Drawing on Çalışkan and Callon’s (2010, see also Callon 2021) ANT-inflected research program on economization, the paper surveys the political contestation that surrounded the various socio-technical interventions introduced by the EU to create a hydrogen market. It reviews the technopolitical issues related to 1) how the EU’s mission politics drives the nascent market, 2) how standardization and certification politics determine what counts as low-carbon hydrogen, 3) how EU Joint Undertakings, IPCEI, and the Clean Hydrogen Alliance create ‘interested’ market actors, 4) how regulatory measures such as the EU Directive on Gas and Hydrogen Networks but also Hydrogen Valleys create market encounters and supply chains, and 5) how the EU Hydrogen Bank stimulates price setting through price support. In doing so the paper provides a comprehensive account of how the EU is imagining and shaping its vision of a hydrogen economy while offering a survey of the technopolitical issues and concerns that accompany environmental market making more generally.

ABSTRACT. Hydrogen has increasingly been promoted by policy and corporate actors as a versatile “Swiss-knife” solution capable of decarbonising multiple hard-to-abate sectors. Such framing has shaped expectations, attracted public funding, and guided corporate investment decisions, particularly in capital-intensive industries. However, when technological promises confront sector-specific constraints, hype-driven investment cycles risk producing divergence between announcements and implementation. This phenomenon is particularly noteworthy in the European Union (EU), where hydrogen has been promoted as a key pillar for industrial decarbonization. Steel is a case in point, considering the recent wave of hydrogen-based steel projects announced by firms following the Green Deal and the EU Hydrogen Strategy. Using a comparative mapping of hydrogen-based steel projects and their progression toward Final Investment Decision, the analysis reveals a clear cross-country divergence, with many stalled or cancelled. We argue that EU-level policy signalling and subsidies created a strong window of opportunity for project announcements, while actual project realization depends on national structural conditions such as electricity prices, infrastructure, permitting regimes, and firm-level capabilities . Findings show that EU-level incentives and (national) subsidies alone are insufficient to create functioning decarbonization markets, as cross-border differences in national (economic) conditions continue to shape industrial outcomes. Besides identifying conditions under which hydrogen-based steelmaking can scale beyond subsidies and support a more coherent, EU-wide transition, the article contributes to debates on decarbonisation and industrial policy more generally, considering country- and firm-specific advantages . Building on the technology and innovation literatures, it also heeds a warning for hype-driven “solutions ”, with steel as case in point.

ABSTRACT. Menstrual cycle tracking apps (MCTAs) have become everyday technologies in the lives of millions of people, positioning private digital technoservices (Clarke, 2000) at the center of contemporary women’s health innovation. Promoted by their developers as tools for democratizing gynecological knowledge through self-tracking and data science, MCTA’s also exist in a context of post-Roe America and renewed threats to reproductive rights : collection of menstrual health data is thus simultaneously framed as an opportunity, a necessity, and a site of concern (Felsberger, 2025 ; Healy, 2021).

This presentation examines how power is enacted through MCTAs as sociotechnical infrastructures that mediate the production of academic knowledge about women’s health. In the context of chronic underfunding of women’s health research, European and American private tech companies owning MCTA’s have emerged as custodians of large-scale datasets and research infrastructures. These developments reconfigure relations of dependency between academic researchers, platform companies, and users. Our research initially stemmed from a seemingly straightforward question: how do MCTAs contribute to the production of knowledge? Through an ethnography of menstrual data infrastructures focusing on invisible work surrounding data management (Star & Strauss, 1999 ; Star, 1999), this inquiry evolved toward an STS-informed analysis of the co-production of applications and scientific knowledge and enabled us to investigate hidden infrastructures of dependency. This shift foregrounds the heterogeneous assemblage of actors—human and non-human—through which knowledge is produced (Geampana, 2024), including academic researchers, in-house scientists employed by MCTA companies, designers, algorithms, datasets, but also users and their daily practices (Della Bianca, 2022 ; Lupton, 2019).

We combine an analysis of 86 scientific publications based on proprietary MCTA datasets, interviews with 31 researchers and 23 MCTA designers, interface analysis, and surveys with users. This multi-sited approach allows us to conceptualize MCTAs as arenas of complexity rather than mere user-facing interfaces and thus to trace how corporate infrastructures, data access regimes, and platform governance shape research questions, methodological standards, and epistemic categories in women’s health research.

--- Clarke, A., Fishman, J., Fosket, J., Mamo, L., & Shim, J. (2000). Technosciences et nouvelle biomédicalisation : racines occidentales, rhizomes mondiaux. Sciences Sociales et Santé, 18(2), 11–42. Della Bianca L. (2022) Configuring the body as pedagogical site: towards a conceptual tool to unpack and situate multiple ontologies of the body in self-tracking apps. Learning, Media and Technology 47:1, p. 65-78. Felsberger, S. (2025) The High Stakes of Tracking Menstruation. Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. Geampana, A. (2024). Fertility apps, datafication and knowledge production in reproductive health. Sociology of Health & Illness, 46(6), 1238–1255. Healy R.L. (2021) Zuckerberg, get out of my uterus! An examination of fertility apps, data-sharing and remaking the female body as a digitalized reproductive subject, Journal of Gender Studies, 30:4, 406-416 Lupton, D. (2019) The thing-power of the human-app health assemblage: thinking with vital materialism. Soc Theory Health 17, 125–139. Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377-391. Star, S. L., & Strauss, A. (1999). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 8(1-2), 9–30.

ABSTRACT. Healthcare algorithms still face persistent implementation challenges. While scholarship emphasizes involving diverse stakeholders to reconcile competing institutional logics (Greenwood et al., 2011; Thornton et al., 2012), such as doctors prioritizing patient care and administrators emphasizing efficiency, this overlooks a crucial reality: most early-stage projects lack the capacity to meaningfully involve key actors, especially external institutional players like industry, regulators, and insurers. Drawing on previous concepts of anticipation (e.g. Barley, 2015; Flyverbom & Garsten, 2021; Guston, 2014), we develop anticipatory work, activities performed to anticipate logics of actors not directly involved in current decision-making, as a theoretical lens and explore its viability as a proxy for involvement.

Through year-long ethnographic fieldwork of pain identification algorithm development at a Dutch neonatal intensive care unit, we examine how an in-house team navigates institutional logics when involvement proves unfeasible. Our findings reveal three power dynamics. First, despite awareness of involvement's importance, we observed myopic anticipation: short-term, reductive stereotyping of institutional logics rather than substantive engagement. Second, even after probing to encourage anticipation or involvement, two barriers persisted: absence of capacity for strategic innovation management and underdeveloped connections, particularly with temporally distant actors. Third, professional hierarchies within hospitals and competing demands on clinical innovators fundamentally constrained anticipatory work.

These findings challenge widespread recommendations for stakeholder involvement by exposing hidden infrastructures of power that make such involvement practically unfeasible for early-stage projects. Anticipatory work, while pragmatic, cannot fully substitute involvement and risks reproducing power asymmetries through selective attention to dominant institutional logics. Our analysis contributes to STS scholarship on innovation by demonstrating how capacity constraints and institutional hierarchies concentrate authority over algorithmic futures before technologies stabilise (Bailey & Barley, 2020; Mackenzie, 2015). We conclude that successful innovation requires pre-emptive support-building and capacity allocation as foundational prerequisites that redistribute power in technology governance from the outset.

References: Bailey, D. E., & Barley, S. R. (2020). Beyond design and use: How scholars should study intelligent technologies. Information and Organization, 30(2), 100286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2019.100286 Barley, W. C. (2015). Anticipatory Work: How the Need to Represent Knowledge Across Boundaries Shapes Work Practices Within Them. Organization Science, 26(6), 1612–1628. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2015.1012 Flyverbom, M., & Garsten, C. (2021). Anticipation and Organization: Seeing, knowing and governing futures. Organization Theory, 2(3), 26317877211020325. https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211020325 Greenwood, R., Raynard, M., Kodeih, F., Micelotta, E. R., & Lounsbury, M. (2011). Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses. Academy of Management Annals, 5(1), 317–371. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2011.590299 Guston, D. H. (2014). Understanding ‘anticipatory governance’. Social Studies of Science, 44(2), 218–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312713508669 Mackenzie, A. (2015). The production of prediction: What does machine learning want? European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 429–445. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577384 Thornton, P. H., Ocasio, W., & Lounsbury, M. (2012). The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure, and Process. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.

ABSTRACT. The dominant mode of pharmaceutical innovation is coming under significant criticism for its lack of production of available treatments for rare and neglected tropical diseases, and the hinderance of access to treatments due to their very high prices. Recent commentators going as so far as suggesting that we may have hit "peak pharma" (Geiger and Bourgeron, 2025).

Considerable STS work has highlighted injustices and vulnerabilities in biomedicine (Clarke, Mamo, Foskett et al., eds. 2010), the power of the pharmaceutical industry (Abraham, 1005; Lexchin, 2016), and offered some direction in facilitating participation in (Epstein, 1996) and intervening in biomedical practices (Zuiderent-Jerak & Jensen, 2007).

However, there seems to be an absence of mobilizing pharmaceutical innovation itself towards social and activist ends.

This paper reports on a series of recently published case studies (Douglas et al., 2025) of "social pharmaceutical innovation" (SPIN) (Douglas et al., 2022) that respond to innovation challenges in biomedical R&D producing inequities or injustices for patients and health systems.

Social pharmaceutical innovation seeks to understand and support initiatives that are addressing these issues outside of the dominant profit-driven innovation model, and thus offering a form of innovation power in the making.

Works Cited

Abraham, J. (1995). Science, politics, and the pharmaceutical industry : controversy and bias in drug regulation. St. Martin’s Press.

Clarke, A. E., Mamo, L., Fosket, J. R., Fishman, J. R., & Shim, J. K. (Eds.). (2010). Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jk5c

Demers-Payette, O., Lehoux, P., & Daudelin, G. (2016). Responsible research and innovation: a productive model for the future of medical innovation. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 3(3), 188-208.

Douglas, C. M., Aith, F., Boon, W., de Neiva Borba, M., Doganova, L., Grunebaum, S., ... & Kleinhout-Vliek, T. (2022). Social pharmaceutical innovation and alternative forms of research, development and deployment for drugs for rare diseases. Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases, 17(1), 344.

Douglas, C. M., Kleinhout-Vliek, T., Hagendijk, R., Rabeharisoa, V., Boon, W., Aith, F., ... & Moors, E. (2025). How social pharmaceutical innovations are addressing problems of availability, accessibility and affordability of drugs for rare diseases. Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases, 20(1), 618.

Epstein, S. (1996). Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge (Vol. 7). Univ of California Press.

Geiger, S., & Bourgeron, T. (2025). Peak Pharma: Toward a New Political Economy of Health.

Lexchin, J. (2016). Private profits versus public policy: the pharmaceutical industry and the Canadian state. University of Toronto Press.

Zuiderent-Jerak, T., & Bruun Jensen, C. (2007). Editorial introduction: Unpacking ‘intervention’in science and technology studies. Science as Culture, 16(3), 227-235.

ABSTRACT. Transdisciplinary research has become a prominent response to growing expectations that social sciences engage more directly with societal challenges. While such collaborative formats promise relevance and inclusivity, they also intensify long-standing tensions concerning scientific autonomy, credibility, and critical capacity. Although these tensions are widely acknowledged, existing debates often remain at a programmatic level, offering limited guidance on how critical social science can be practically sustained within co-productive research settings. This paper addresses this gap by first advancing a process-oriented understanding of transdisciplinarity – building on Zuiderent-Jeraks notion of situated interventions. Instead of evaluating research by its capacity to deliver predefined solutions or impacts, this paper advocates for shifting analytical attention toward the qualification of deliberative and co-productive processes. Drawing on Latour’s notion of critical proximity, intervention is understood as a form of engaged analysis that remains close enough to ongoing practices and controversies to render problem framings, knowledge claims, and normative assumptions empirically visible, without collapsing into advocacy or solutionism. Second, the paper introduces reflexive boundary work as a necessary complement to process orientation. Reflexive boundary work refers to the continuous articulation and scrutiny of the epistemic scope, role, and limits of scientific reasoning within collaborative research constellations. Rather than insulating science from societal engagement, it makes the conditions of scientific autonomy explicit and negotiable, thereby sustaining the critical capacity of social science under conditions of close societal entanglement. By specifying process orientation and reflexive boundary work as concrete practices of transdisciplinary research, the paper contributes to STS debates on participation, intervention, and knowledge co-production. It reframes transdisciplinary collaboration as a site of epistemic inquiry rather than instrumental problem-solving and clarifies how critical social science can remain analytically robust while operating in close proximity to societal processes.

ABSTRACT. As part of commitment to responsible research assessment, funders around the world introduce new evaluative approaches which aim to unsettle established research quality notions. One example are narrative-style CV formats meant to capture diverse forms of scholarly activities and decrease the overreliance on quantitative quality proxies in funding peer review (Bordignon et al. 2023; Albert et al. 2025). A pertinent empirical question is how the introduction of new CV formats influences reviewers’ practices, with possible implications to what quality notions they (re)produce.

In such an assessment context, research(er) quality resides both in judgement devices such as CVs as well as in flexible agency of the reviewers to read the information through the lens of their values and norms (Kaltenbrunner and de Rijcke 2019). With that in mind, I explore how reviewers interpret new type of information and judge research(er) quality using a new material apparatus designed to disrupt common quality notions. With diversity of information inscribed in the narrative CV comes a choice of how to value it. I discuss how reviewers – powerful gatekeepers, or custodians, of research quality – react to new enactments of research quality brought forward by the applicants and to the expectations regarding their valuations put on them by the funder. I consider how their pre-existing notions of quality and legitimate evaluative evidence interact with the new CV, whether through resisting new enactments or allowing their particular understandings more visibility.

The empirical material comes from a case study of two competitive project funding calls organized by a Dutch research funder. It consists of interviews focused on recreating reviewers’ assessments of the CVs submitted in the new format. The interviews were document-assisted, i.e. involving CVs, scores, and written evaluation reports which anchored the conversations about judging research(er) quality and justifying assessments.

ABSTRACT. Large-scale interdisciplinary programs aim to tackle today’s grand societal challenges. The hope is that by pulling together large amounts of funding and working in massively interdisciplinary teams, solutions to big challenges come within reach. However, our study found that university infrastructure, which typically remains discipline oriented, often causes tensions in interdisciplinary programs. This study contributes to the recent efforts in expanding the field of infrastructure to interdisciplinarity in STS. We took a deep dive into the inner working of interdisciplinary programs by analysing them from an infrastructure perspective. Based on fieldwork in three large-scale interdisciplinary programs on inequality, health, diversity and inclusion in the Netherlands and 28 in-depth interviews with research and professional staff, our findings are twofold. Through the empirical study of moments of tension in collaborations, we identify bureaucratic, educational, social, and spatial configurations with the aim to equip members of interdisciplinary research programs with a vocabulary to articulate challenges in everyday work. Second, we uncover mitigation strategies of how members work around and with the existing university infrastructure that serve as practical starting points for professional training, reworking regulation, or even nurturing institutional change. We conclude with outlining how universities can implement infrastructural rearrangements to bring interdisciplinary programs to fruition by learning from everyday research practices.

ABSTRACT. From housing and energy cooperatives to community gardens, artistic practices and action groups, it seems that alternative rural-urban futures are already in the making. Such initiatives make space for and embody alternative values and relations in the here-and-now, while creating imaginaries of what such futures could look like. But what kinds of infrastructures allow for embedding local initiatives in processes of wider societal transformation?

We propose to use the STS-NL conference itself as a knowledge infrastructure to further explore and bring together alternative spaces, practices and imaginaries at the University of Twente campus and in the cultural ecosystem of Enschede. Through two workshops, inviting artistic and walking methodologies, we ground our academic work in past and present practices, spaces and imaginaries of commoning in the local landscape.

Walkshop 1 will be led by artist Merel Zwarts (part of the artist collective who developed the project “Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills”) and take place on the UT campus, situated in a historical landscape of commoning (marken and meenten). The Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills is a travelling, participatory museum that listens to the history, (im)material heritage, and present-day inhabitants – human and non-human. The walkshop engages situated, artistic research methodologies to collectively attune to and (re)imagine human-nature relations on campus. The format builds on previous collaborations with the RUrban Futures Collective around the concept of “green intimacies” and aims to contribute to the development of experiential rurban pedagogies.

The RUrban Futures Collective is a transdisciplinary collective of researchers at the University of Twente who explore the conditions for just, biodiverse and democratic futures by addressing the interactions between rural-urban spaces, practices and imaginaries. Using collaborative, engaged and arts-based methods, we seek to democratise conversations about biodiversity, climate, and futures.

ABSTRACT. Menstrual cycle tracking apps (MCTAs) have become everyday technologies in the lives of millions of people, positioning private digital technoservices (Clarke, 2000) at the center of contemporary women’s health innovation. In the context of chronic underfunding of women’s health research, European and American private tech companies that own MCTAs have also emerged as custodians of large-scale datasets and research infrastructures. These developments reconfigure relations of dependency between academic researchers, platform companies, and users (Felsberger, 2025 ; Healy, 2021).

The MenstruTech research project draws on feminist STS and examines MCTAs as sociotechnical infrastructures that mediate the production of both academic and experiential knowledge about women’s health (Della Bianca, 2022 ; Geampana, 2024 ; Lupton, 2019). In this presentation, we draw on a series of interviews with academic researchers and in-house scientists whose work is based on proprietary MCTA datasets (n = 31), as well as interviews with MCTA designers (n = 23).

Our interviews reveal that both scientists and designers share a common hope that large-scale MCTA datasets could serve as an alternative to established gynecological norms and categorizations, and thus offer a more diverse and inclusive understanding of menstrual health. These expectations rely on two core MCTA technologies. First, the production of large-scale datasets is viewed as an opportunity to challenge the so-called “28-day” model. Second, algorithmic personalization is framed as a way to move beyond the normal/pathological dichotomy by accommodating a broader range of menstrual experiences through a new individualized category: “your normal.”

This presentation examines how researchers and designers navigate classificatory systems and how hidden infrastructures shape both research practices and technological design (Star & Strauss, 1999 ; Star, 1999). Despite these ambitions, our findings suggest that researchers and designers struggle to develop models, categories, or infrastructures that do not rely on existing gynecological categorizations. Drawing on interviews combined with an analysis of MCTA interfaces, we show that gynecological norms continue to structure activities such as user onboarding, database construction, and the cleaning and interpretation of user data—processes that themselves rely on classificatory practices. Moreover, we observe that specific menstrual experiences, such as irregular cycles, are framed simultaneously as medical and algorithmic problems, thereby reinforcing their pathologization.

--- Clarke, A., Fishman, J., Fosket, J., Mamo, L., & Shim, J. (2000). Technosciences et nouvelle biomédicalisation : racines occidentales, rhizomes mondiaux. Sciences Sociales et Santé, 18(2), 11–42. Della Bianca L. (2022) Configuring the body as pedagogical site: towards a conceptual tool to unpack and situate multiple ontologies of the body in self-tracking apps. Learning, Media and Technology 47:1, p. 65-78. Felsberger, S. (2025) The High Stakes of Tracking Menstruation. Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. Geampana, A. (2024). Fertility apps, datafication and knowledge production in reproductive health. Sociology of Health & Illness, 46(6), 1238–1255. Healy R.L. (2021) Zuckerberg, get out of my uterus! An examination of fertility apps, data-sharing and remaking the female body as a digitalized reproductive subject, Journal of Gender Studies, 30:4, 406-416 Lupton, D. (2019) The thing-power of the human-app health assemblage: thinking with vital materialism. Soc Theory Health 17, 125–139. Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377-391. Star, S. L., & Strauss, A. (1999). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 8(1-2), 9–30.

ABSTRACT. In medical anthropology and sociology, there is a longstanding concern with how hospitals organise and shape death and dying. In this talk, I revisit these concerns by attending to the ‘practical ontologies’ (Jensen 2010) embedded and enacted through a contemporary electronic patient record (EPR) and clinical management system - an digital infrastructure that has become central to the politics of living and dying in ageing societies.

Focusing on the work of geriatricians’ - specialists in the medical care of older adults - I ask: what kinds of dying are made possible by a digital infrastructure that mediates both administrative imperatives for efficient patient flow and clinicians’ efforts to provide good patient-centred care? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a large teaching hospital in the English Midlands, I take inspiration from Jensen & Morita's (2015) notion of infrastructure as an ‘ontological experiment’ and recent scholarship on the politics of time in technology and healthcare. The paper makes three analytical gestures, to trace the temporalities enacted in: (1) the scripts built into the system’s default settings, drop down menus and categories; (2) clinicians’ techniques for tinkering with time as they work with, around, and against the software; and (3) the kinds of time made manifest in their absence.

While the past decades have seen an institutionalisation of the ‘good death’ in the modern hospital, attention to the classificatory and infrastructural regimes embedded in the technologies used to manage these institutions shows how other possibilities for living and dying well become foreclosed. My account foregrounds this chronopolitics: one in which slow deterioration, long lives in decline, and uncertain endings are known yet rendered practically unsayable, to ask how things could be otherwise, if only we had the time do categories differently.

ABSTRACT. In (AI or data-driven) health research, categorizing patients by sex, ‘race’, and socio-economic status are routinely used as proxies for risk prediction. However, STS scholars highlight that these rigid classifications can lead to stigmatization, discrimination, and deeper health inequalities. This raises a critical question: how can we develop alternative ways of dealing with categorization that do not cause harm or reinforce systemic inequality? Florencia Luna’s layer model of vulnerability offers an alternative: instead of labelling entire groups as vulnerable, several contextual factors can form “layers” of vulnerability for individuals. Would this approach make it possible to deconstruct classifications and reconstruct new, equitable ways of dealing with human differences? We suggest that thinking about a layered approach would allow us to point out how certain contexts create vulnerability and as such would point to more structural solutions. We would like to organize a session (45 min) where we each tackle the concept of vulnerability from within the context of each of our separate projects and draw several lessons to discuss with the audience in an interactive discussion.

1. Ilse Dijkstra, Maastricht University, ‘The construction of low socioeconomic status’ I examined how professional education, health research, health policy, and health interventions jointly construct low socioeconomic status as a category within the governance of health inequalities. Through their intertwined practices, these domains co-produce a dominant image of low socioeconomic groups as uniform, unhealthy, unintelligent, and unmotivated. Building on STS scholarship that has previously deconstructed categories of ‘race’, ethnicity, and gender, I explore how this dominant conception can be critically interrogated and reconfigured.

2. Margot Vandenbroucke, Radboudumc, Katalysatorproject – ‘Ethics of lifestyle conversations’ Ilse Dijkstra’s (and others) work shows how healthcare research has created certain categories (e.g. ‘low socio-economic status’ and ‘low educated’) and with that created ‘unhealthy’ groups who are ‘hard to reach’ for lifestyle interventions. I will focus on how a well-intended turn in prevention that tried to take the notion of blame away in these interventions, instead labelled these groups as vulnerable, without acknowledging the complexity of health and illness, or inequality in society. A layered conceptualisation of vulnerability in the context of lifestyle care is needed so that we can analyse how to use it in the practical sphere. 3. Tessa van Rijssel, Radboudumc, PATHS consortium, Proposal Horizon 2025 (under review) We examine how Luna’s dynamic view of vulnerability can guide responsible data intensive for Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) research. HS is a chronic, autoinflammatory skin disease that disproportionately affects groups sometimes considered vulnerable, such as women and people with lower socio economic status, and it is associated with factors like smoking and obesity. Current research seeks to address these disparities through patient stratification and risk prediction. We explore questions such as: How can at-risk groups be identified, without harmful causal assumptions or reinforcing stereotypes? And how can groups labelled as vulnerable be involved in this type of research?

4. Michel Vitale, Radboudumc, MERAI lab, ‘ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI-enabled low-dose CT lung cancer screening’. Based on a collaborative ethnography study with engineers developing AI for lung cancer screening, my research examines how algorithmic fairness is interpreted, negotiated, and enacted within medical imaging pipelines, revealing gaps and trade-offs between formal fairness frameworks and everyday design and implementation practices. In this setting, fairness emerges through situated practices and is shaped by available resources and ‘soft impact’ (e.g. norm shifts, responsibility relations, and trust dynamics), rather than residing solely in performance metrics or rigid taxonomies. Building on these insights, we explore how Luna’s layered analysis of vulnerability might be operationalized in this sociotechnical context, by identifying interacting vulnerability layers, their stimulus conditions, and cascade risks that render algorithmic disparities ethically meaningful in practice.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, I will discuss recent work (conducted together with Ula N. Ratajec, Utrecht University, and currently under review) on the increasingly popular idea that AI is the future of women’s health. I will also draw connections between this project and my other work, which focuses on (strategic) sex essentialism, individual responsibilization, and (self-)surveillance of women in mainstream women’s health discourse, as well as sexist bias in AI (see references below), to address the questions raised in track 9, “Rethinking classifications”.

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), hyped expectations often contrast with lacking results and structural harms. In this study, we conducted a qualitative analysis of recent publications, sourced from medical databases, that discuss the use of AI in relation to the gender/sex health gap specifically. Using a feminist perspective to decode how gender, sex, and AI are conceptualized and related to one another in this corpus, we find that sex essentialism and AI hype are broadly endorsed, naturalized, and mutually reinforced through rhetorical loops that allow spurious claims to flourish. We argue that this is most likely to further impoverish our understanding of gender/sex health disparities, depoliticize women’s health, marginalize gender/sex diverse patients, and intensify socially unequal health surveillance practices. We call on women’s health advocates to turn the tide by resisting the hype and fostering more critical understandings of both technology and gender/sex health inequities.

Relevant references: Kleinherenbrink, A. (2024). His and hers medicine? (Strategic) essentialism and women’s health. In A. Dufourcq, A. Halsema, K. Smiet & K. Vintges (Eds.), Purple Brains, Working on the limits of feminist philosophy (pp. 119-131), Radboud University Press. Kleinherenbrink, A., Castellano, E. (Asiel) ., & Göttgens, I. (2025). Het Vrouwenhart: (strategisch) essentialisme in de zorg [poster]. Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17461827 Kleinherenbrink, A., Radhakrishnan, R., Boulicault, M., Delano, M., Lockhart, J., Pape, M., & Ratajec, U.N. (2025). Beyond the hype of AI as a panacea for women's health [preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17295042 Erscoi, L.A., Kleinherenbrink, A., and Guest, O. (2023). Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women. Pre-print, SocArXiv, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jqxb6_v1 Mohr, V., Kleinherenbrink, A., & Varis, P. (2021). “You can’t ignore a number this big”: Gender, risk, and responsibility in online advocacy for women’s brain health. Qualitative Health Research, 31(4), 677-690.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes to examine how normativities around artificial intelligence, energy, and sustainability are done in practice—that is, how they are enacted, stabilized, and contested across socio-technical arrangements rather than merely articulated in policy texts or ethical frameworks. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), the contribution explores how emerging AI systems in energy-related domains (such as energy management, forecasting, optimization, or sustainability assessment) become sites where epistemological, normative, and policy-related questions are intertwined and negotiated in situ. It empirically explores the three cases of data centres, digital twins, and decentralised urban energy networks in the Netherlands. From an epistemological perspective, the paper attends to how specific forms of knowledge and certainty are mobilized to make AI-based energy systems actionable. Energy and sustainability are often framed as domains requiring quantification, prediction, and optimization, yet AI introduces new layers of opacity, uncertainty, and delegated decision-making. The paper asks how practitioners, developers, regulators, and users deal with incalculable uncertainties, model assumptions, and data-driven plausibilities in everyday contexts of use. It examines how ignorance and uncertainty are not simply deficits to be resolved but become productive elements in regulatory science, risk assessment, and infrastructural decision-making around AI-driven energy systems. Normatively, the paper focuses on how ideas of “sustainable”, “efficient”, “responsible”, or “green” AI are operationalized through technical architectures, standards, and routines. Rather than treating sustainability norms as external constraints imposed on technology, the analysis foregrounds how norms are embedded into algorithms, data infrastructures, and design choices, producing specific user–technology relations and socio-technical regimes. This includes attention to tensions between formal legal or policy norms (e.g. accountability, transparency, fairness) and technical normativities encoded in AI systems, such as optimization criteria, thresholds, or default settings. The paper asks how these different normative orders converge, clash, or remain misaligned in practice, and what is lost or transformed in translation. From a policy and governance perspective, the paper examines how AI, energy, and sustainability are co-articulated within policy imaginaries and regulatory efforts at different levels. Rather than focusing solely on de jure provisions, it emphasizes law-in-action: how regulatory goals are enacted through procurement practices, pilot projects, standards, and infrastructural arrangements. The analysis explores governance by design, where sustainability and AI regulation are delegated to technical systems and protocols, and considers how responsibility and accountability are distributed across human and non-human actors. Conceptually, the paper draws on STS traditions that understand law and regulation as performative, relational, and materially enacted. It mobilizes insights from studies of regulatory science, co-production, actor-network theory, and posthuman legalities to show how AI in energy contexts reshapes normative boundaries between technology, law, and society. By situating AI within longer histories of energy governance and technological regulation, the paper also reflects on parallels with earlier socio-technical transitions and the challenges of establishing normative frameworks for them. Overall, the paper argues that normativities about AI, energy, and sustainability are not simply emerging but are continuously being tested, revised, and stabilized through everyday socio-technical practices. Attending to these processes is crucial for understanding how sustainability and AI governance are practically accomplished—and contested—across contemporary socio-technical landscapes. The case studies are based on first explorations of policy documents, media reports and analyses of relevant actors using qualitative research including personal conversations with key actors. The explorative approach aims at finding appropriate categories for descriptive explanation according to the standards of the Grounded Theory method. This is part of a new research project at very early stage but with lots of stakeholder contacts already.

ABSTRACT. This presentation argues that adequate AI governance requires robust conceptual grounding. Specifically, it argues that conceptual engineering–i.e., normative conceptual work aimed at the improvement of concepts (Chalmers, 2020)–is foundational to addressing the governance challenges raised by AI technologies, such as self-driving vehicles, LLMs, and low-code/no-code AI platforms. Indeed, governance outcomes are shaped by conceptual choices. This presentation illustrates how conceptual engineering can illuminate the ways in which different conceptualisations of the same socio-technical artefact can lead to vastly different governance frameworks, by taking different perspectives to the description of the technology and emphasising different features of the technology. For example, depending on how LLMs are conceptualised–e.g., as author-like entities, editor-like entities, mere spell-checkers, etc–, regulators may reach vastly different conclusions regarding the legal regimes that should apply (Bennett, 2020; Berensmeyer et al, 2012; He, 2019; Lacruz Mantecón, 2023; Lauber-Rönsberg & Hetmankl 2019). Such insights can and should be generalised beyond the specific case of LLMs, which merely exemplify a broader pattern in technology governance: (especially) when new socio-technical artefacts disrupt established conceptual categories, the governance of such technologies cannot safely bypass the deliberate and systematic assessment and refinement of such conceptual categories. Ultimately, this paper argues that conceptual engineering is not an auxiliary concern, but a foundational element of robust AI governance, and should provide the necessary groundwork for technology governance frameworks that are both legally sound and ethically robust.

ABSTRACT. Traditionally, the dominant institution that was invested with epistemic authority began with religious beliefs in pre-modern society and transitioned to scientific rationality in the modern period. However, today, due to the increasing digitalization that is taking place, artificial intelligence is assuming a growing role in the production and production processes of knowledge. These coincided with broader global shifts characterized by technological acceleration, geopolitical uncertainty, and heightened influence wielded by transnational digital platforms.

This paper raises the question of how algorithmic systems reconfigure epistemic authority and which forms of power do emerge when knowledge production becomes embedded in global AI-driven infrastructures. Based on Foucauldian understandings of power/knowledge and supported by insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper adopts a critical-theoretical perspective in its examination of AI not as a purely technical tool but as a sociotechnical arrangement within which practices of classification, decision-making, and truth production are constructed. This analysis positions the question of algorithmic power in the context of the contemporary global shift and points to the way in which the notions of objectivity and neutrality associated with AI serve to mask underlying value structures and support the primary stake of the large technological firms in the notion of AI. As opposed to an analysis of the ethical inadequacies and determinate power of AI, the text examines the translation and formulation of ethics in the context of the process of algorithmic systems. In a way that facilitates the consideration of the implications of the new regimes of epistemic power emerging through governance algorithms, the contribution moves forward in terms of new agendas within the area of Science and Technology Studies. It points out the role of knowledge dynamics principles and invisibility principles in governance algorithms.

ABSTRACT. Research and theory in education are inherently multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary and is conceptualised as such in international institutions (f.ex. REF, EU, OECD aso). In Germany, the field has a distinct history of academic pedagogy, which, over time and in connection with the growing societal significance of scientific knowledge for teaching, developed into a university-based discipline. Scholarly discussions of education began as early as the late seventeenth century, but education emerged as an autonomous academic discipline in the early nineteenth century. Education was thus initially conceptualized as an idea of self-formation in relation to the world, as higher education of and for humankind (civilisation/“Höherbildung der Menschheit”) and as an institutionalized and regulated mode of knowledge distribution -largely oriented toward boys, men and citizenship. The development of science of education has repeatedly—both historically and in the present—been articulated through comparisons with medicine as an academic model. Such references have served to legitimize education as a scientific discipline by invoking standards of professionalization, expertise, and methodological rigor. Within this process, distinct phases of psychologization, sociologization and empirization can be identified, reflecting shifting theoretical as well as empirical orientations – including in the emergence of new disciplinary associations, f.ex. Empirical Educational Research. One effect of this development is that educational science has continually sought to articulate its own theory of a practical science and to demarcate itself from societal expectations articulated through neighboring disciplines. Moreover, the German Educational Research Association, institutionalized a dedicated subdivision for research on educational research that emerged from historical educational research. This unit serves precisely the purpose of observing disciplinary dynamics and has developed its own history spanning more than forty years. It evolved alongside, but largely independently from, traditions in STS. Since pedagogy is a “Science of the Impossible” (Wimmer 2015), the presentation demonstrates how the subdivision and its observation of educational research constitute a particular mode of a “German” research culture concerned with the study of disciplinary shifts. At the same time, it shows how educational research itself becomes an object of inquiry from an STS inspired ‘outside’ view, particularly with regard to the ways in which societal norms of cultural or gender regulations are epistemically embedded, reproduced, or contested and what has become unseen.

ABSTRACT. Over the past 15 years, STS scholars have developed a rich body of work examining how researchers respond to intensifying regimes of productivity, accountability, integrity, and evaluation. Concepts such as audit cultures, indicator games, epistemic living spaces, coping or survival strategies, and questionable research practices have become key analytical tools for understanding how academic actors navigate reform pressures and locally adopt, adapt, disregard or counter policy initiatives. At the same time, many of these concepts have travelled beyond STS, entering policy debates, activist repertoires, and institutional reform agendas focused on “research culture.”

This roundtable proposes that STS (NL) takes stock of this literature by asking not only what its concepts have revealed, but also what they have done. Drawing inspiration from reform initiatives emerging within activist circles and academic institutions - such as the academic manifesto movement of the mid-2010s and programs like Recognition & Rewards - we examine how STS analyses have intersected with concrete efforts at change. While these interventions differ in ambition and practice, they have resonated internationally and prompted reflection on which strategies of reform, resistance, and transformation have proven effective, and which have not.

Bringing together scholars who have shaped and extended STS approaches to research culture reform, the roundtable explores the looping effects through which critical analyses of academic privileges, vulnerabilities, and forms of resistance feed back into institutional imaginaries of the “academic researcher,” along with emerging regimes of responsibility and reform instruments. By situating STS scholarship itself as an active participant in the politics of research culture reform, the roundtable advances the track’s aim of expanding epistemic accountability beyond metrics and solutionism. It invites a historically grounded and analytically sharp conversation about critique, activism, and reflexive scholarship amid prolonged uncertainty and reform fatigue, foregrounding tensions between critique and co-optation, reflexivity and managerialism, and resistance and normalization.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how Covid-19 testing in Austrian schools became a political, moral, and administrative problem during the pandemic. Drawing on the concept of problematization (Jasanoff & Metzler), the study does not treat testing as a technical intervention but as an object whose meaning, necessity, and legitimacy had to be continuously constructed. To do so the study is looking at how Covid-19 testing in schools was defined regarding what testing was used for, how it was organized and why it was needed. This analysis shows how meaning and importance of Covid-19 testing changed over time and why. This study is based on two types of data. First a detailed timeline on Covid-19 testing in Austrian Schools, based on newspaper reports and official announcements and secondly interviews with important and highly responsible politicians from the educational sector. These two sources together show how different ideas about Covid-19 testing in school shaped decisions. Three main kinds of problem definitions appear. Ontological problems show how actors describe what a Covid-19 test in different situations and at different times during the Covid-19 pandemic was. The moral dimension covers different responsibilities regarding testing and how these shifted. And on the administrative side the study shows how testing was carried out, which infrastructure had to be created for that and by whom. Moreover, it shows that the idea of preparedness is behind the implementation of testing in schools, since tests have represented a safety measure that demonstrates how schools have prepared for the pandemic, enabling them to monitor risks and react quickly and effectively. The study argues that crisis governance shapes, and is shaped by, public and political debate. It makes a valuable contribution to the Science and Technology Studies (STS) discussion on preparedness, demonstrating how problematization can be employed to analyse such processes.

ABSTRACT. The COVID-19 pandemic has firmly placed the resilience and preparedness of healthcare systems on national and international policy agendas. Across countries, healthcare systems responded in markedly different ways, revealing substantial variation in crisis governance. A critical factor underlying these differences was the type of knowledge and expertise that informed decision making processes. During the pandemic, virological and biomedical expertise received substantial attention in advisory and governance structures, while behavioural, social, and organizational sciences were less prominently represented in the Netherlands. As a result, policy responses predominantly focused on biomedical aspects in acute and hospital based care, even though other healthcare sectors such as long term care, mental health services, and preventive care also experienced profound and lasting impacts. This imbalance can be partly explained by the composition of national decision making bodies, which were often dominated by biomedical perspectives. In the Netherlands, the pandemic highlighted the absence of a sufficiently developed integral decision making framework that allows for the systematic weighing of for example epidemiological, societal, ethical, economic and legal considerations in times of crisis. In response, the UNITY project aims to contribute to the development of such an integral assessment framework. This study investigates how different forms of knowledge shape crisis decision making processes and outcomes.

Using a qualitative research design, the project combines semi structured interviews, participant observations, and document analysis to examine decision making at the national level. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between different types of academic knowledge such as epidemiology, virology, health economics, and the social sciences and non academic knowledge. By analyzing how these knowledge forms are mobilized, prioritized, or marginalized during crises, the study seeks to inform more inclusive and balanced decision making structures and to strengthen healthcare system resilience in future public health emergencies.

ABSTRACT. Pandemic preparedness relies not only on formal plans and protocols but also on implicit advisory infrastructures that organise how knowledge, uncertainty, and urgency are handled before and during crises. This paper examines how ongoing research on pandemic preparedness in the Netherlands mobilises such infrastructures, shaping whose knowledge becomes ‘actionable’ at different moments of an unfolding emergency. Drawing on thematic analysis of interdisciplinary simulation exercises of a fictional virus outbreak to develop integrated science advice, I analyse how epistemic hierarchies are (re)produced and reconfigured across different phases of crisis anticipation.

My analysis shows a temporal pattern in how advisory infrastructures organise knowledge integration. In the early “alert” phase, high uncertainty structurally privileges biomedical expertise as an epistemic infrastructure, positioning insights from social sciences and humanities as contextual or secondary considerations. As the fictional scenario moves into a full “pandemic” phase, crisis temporality and perceived urgency compress deliberation, further narrowing epistemic diversity and foregrounding logics of ‘containment’ of the virus, while concerns about feasibility, equity, and lived realities are sidelined. Only in a later “transition” phase, when uncertainty and urgency ease, does space reopen for infrastructures of reflexive, value-based reasoning and more symmetrical exchanges across different scientific disciplines.

These dynamics are effects of advisory infrastructures embedded in preparedness practices and institutional procedures for science advice. Seen through feminist theories of situated knowledges, the analysis highlights how these infrastructures risk reproducing epistemic injustices precisely at the moments when knowledge infrastructures are crucially mobilised for pandemic policies. The paper concludes by discussing how rethinking the temporal and infrastructural design of science advice for pandemics could enable more epistemically just forms of crisis governance.

ABSTRACT. Calls for more “just” futures are increasingly prominent in environmental policy debates, reflecting growing recognition that unsustainability cannot be addressed through technical solutions alone. Scientific expertise plays a central role in informing and legitimising policy choices – and in this context is expected to inform debates about “just and sustainable” futures while remaining objective and policy-relevant. Yet because justice involves explicit value judgements, it is often framed as a source of normativity that sits uneasily with claims to neutrality. This paper challenges that framing. Drawing on STS, it starts from the premise that policy-oriented knowledge is inherently shaped by normative choices, embedded in research questions, indicators, models, and forms of policy advice. From this perspective, justice does not add normativity to science–policy processes but makes existing value commitments visible. Building on STS debates about the role of scientific expertise in managing or engaging with normative disagreement at the science–policy interface of environmental governance, the paper develops a four-pronged conceptualisation of justice as it appears in science–policy knowledge production. These prongs conceptualise justice as: (1) an outcome, reflected in the distributional implications of policy-relevant analyses; (2) an analytical framework, shaping how problems, responsibilities, and trade-offs are conceptualised; (3) a source of social and political legitimacy, influencing whose knowledge and concerns are recognised; and (4) a reflexive dimension of the research process itself, concerning how values are acknowledged and negotiated. Drawing on experience at the science–policy interface, the paper mobilises this framework as an analytical lens that shows how justice intersects with existing epistemic practices in policy-oriented environmental assessment, sometimes clarifying trade-offs and blind spots, and sometimes exposing tensions between commitments to neutrality and inclusiveness. The paper argues that explicitly engaging with justice strengthens the policy-relevance of science by making value commitments explicit, analysable, and contestable.

ABSTRACT. The evolution of science communication has shifted from a unidirectional model of information dissemination toward more interactive and participatory forms of public engagement. Digital platforms have significantly accelerated this transition by enabling scientific actors to reach non-specialist audiences directly. This study examines the WeChat Official Accounts of scientific journals indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), with particular attention to their content framing strategies and patterns of user engagement. By analyzing the stylistic features of WeChat posts alongside audience interaction metrics, the study investigates how Chinese scientific journals communicate scientific knowledge and construct institutional identities on a domestic social media platform. Combining statistical analysis with textual analysis, the findings reveal that the majority of WeChat posts published by scientific journals are primarily oriented toward scientific experts or semi-expert audiences rather than the general public. Post titles frequently foreground developed countries, high-impact international journals, senior researchers, and elite institutions, reflecting a communication strategy centered on prestige signaling. Furthermore, symbolic representations of authority, institutional credibility, and academic prestige are found to play a more prominent role in stimulating user engagement than technical explanations or informational depth. This pattern partially aligns with dual-processing theory, suggesting that peripheral cues related to status and authority may be particularly influential in shaping audience responses within social media based science communication.

ABSTRACT. Our paper examines the relationship between science and societal actors through the theoretical lens of scientism (Sorell 1994, Haack 2012). In particular, we describe the understanding of science widespread among adolescents as a form of naïve scientism and interpret naïve scientism as a major vulnerability to scientific misinformation. Dominant research on youth vulnerability to scientific misinformation adopts a behaviorist “effects” paradigm, prioritizing quantitative measures of exposure and belief. We criticize this approach for neglecting the interpretative practices of audiences and propose an alternative, qualitative framework. Drawing on a multi-method study conducted in Northern Italian high schools in 2023-24, we shift analytical focus from deficits in students' scientific literacy to their situated interpretative practices when engaging with media-conveyed scientific information. In this way, our analysis identifies a widespread “naïve scientism”: uncritical deference to scientific authority rooted in a simplistic understanding of the scientific method as a guarantor of uncontested, objective truth. From this perspective, scientific knowledge grounded on data is deemed uncontroversial, not qualified in terms of consensus, confidence and probability, and not susceptible to change over time, and disagreement among scientists is obviously interpreted in terms of a conflict of interest or the incompetence of one of the parties involved. We argue that this unrealistic conceptualization, while fostering surface-level trust, constitutes a profound vulnerability. It renders students ill-equipped to navigate scientific controversies and public debates, increasing the risk of disillusionment when science’s contested, social nature becomes visible. Consequently, today’s core challenge is not merely exposure to scientific “fake news,” but a fundamental misunderstanding of how reliable scientific knowledge is produced that neglects its collective and negotiated nature. Teaching STS approaches in high schools could be a first step to counteracting this attitude. Haack, Susan. 2012. “Six Signs of Scientism.” Logos and Episteme, 3(1): 75-95. Sorell, Tom.1994. Scientism: Philosophy and the infatuation with science. London and New York: Routledge.

ABSTRACT. The recent introduction of AI technologies in many areas of life has created a need for increased AI literacy. Yet, there is no consensus on what AI is, what it should be used for, and how it should be governed. Although disagreements about AI often revolve around specific technical choices or regulatory measures, they are rooted in more fundamental and frequently implicit understandings of AI’s nature, societal impact and expected futures. These different socio-technical imaginaries of AI, here called AI narratives, have distinct normative implications for what it means to be ‘AI literate’ and how AI literacy programs should be designed. AI literacy programs, in turn, are norm-setting practices that shape how people understand, use and govern AI technologies.

To analyze the normative implications of AI narratives for AI literacy, this contribution introduces an analytical typology, mapping four dominant AI narratives that shape AI development and governance. The typology is structured along two dimensions. The first concerns expectations regarding the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), ranging from imaginaries in which AGI is anticipated in the near future to imaginaries in which AGI is expected only in the distant future or not at all. The second dimension concerns the evaluative orientation toward AI, differentiating between imaginaries foregrounding anticipated benefits and those emphasizing risks, harms, and unintended consequences. Combining these dimensions yields four AI narratives, typically associated with AI boomers (AGI, positive), AI doomers (AGI, negative), AI enthusiasts (no AGI, positive), and AI critics (no AGI, negative).

This contribution examines the normative assumptions embedded in these narratives and how they shape the design of AI literacy materials, including which knowledge, skills and forms of engagement with AI are presented as relevant. The proposed typology thus highlights AI literacy as a site where socio-technical imaginaries are translated into everyday normative expectations.

ABSTRACT. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the way society interacts. This change, linked to era of surveillance capitalism, requires decision-makers to seek solutions to regulate this type of technology. In Brazil, the government has been debating the regulation and use of AI. One of the initiatives to regulate AI in Brazil is the Bill nº. 2.338/2023 – Brazilian AI Bill -, which has been considered a participatory process, including several public hearings in which different actors shared their understanding of the topic. These expressions of technical knowledge, intertwined with political interests, are currently being listened by parliamentarians of the National Congress in the formulation of an AI regulatory framework. This paper proposes to investigate how the definitions of AI are constructed and transferred in the discourses of the public hearings in the legislative process of Brazilian AI Bill, and to what extent are they disputed in the process of formulating Brazilian public policy on AI. For this, the general objective is to analyze how definitions of AI are constructed, transferred, and disputed in the discourses of the actors in the public hearings of Brazilian AI Bill, examining their effects on the process of formulating Brazilian public policy on AI. The methodology used will be discourse analysis based on the documents and recordings of the public hearings on Brazilian AI Bill that took place between 2023 and 2025 in Brazil. The study aims to outline the different definitions of AI existing in the speeches of the actors and understand how the dispute between these concepts are considered by parliamentarians in the formulation of Brazilian public policy on AI. This research aims to understand how conceptual disputes can shape public policy on AI in Brazil.

ABSTRACT. Objective The open science (OS) movement is growing, with increasing policies, guidelines, tools and infrastructures being developed to support researchers’ engagement in OS practices. However, there is no widely accepted definition of OS. This study aimed to chart how OS is understood in different parts of the world and how OS and OA discourses relate to knowledge equity, asking: How is OS – including its goals, practices, and scope – understood in researchers’ guidelines across the globe? Methods We conducted a scoping review and critical discourse analysis of national and international OS policies and guidelines aimed at researchers. We critically assessed: i) whether guidance documents addressed OS in terms of equity or other goals; ii) Eurocentric priorities and epistemologies promoted in them; iii) socio-political assumptions; iv) tone and language; v) colonial logics of superiority and inferiority. Results The analysis included 69 national and international documents, with most originating from North America, Europe, and Latin America. Our results show that OS discourses are exaggerated, framing OS as a solution to address all scientific and societal problems. Furthermore, they often provide contradictory and conflicting ideas about what OS can achieve. Many documents frame OS as a tool to promote economic growth, efficiency, and global competitiveness. Others see OS as necessary to safeguard research quality, integrity and reproducibility through transparency. In contrast, few documents address structural injustices, global power dynamics, knowledge equity and inclusion. These differences suggest that OS is not a unified movement, but a contested one, shaped by diverse institutional priorities, sociopolitical agendas and private industries. Conclusion OS discourses seem to reproduce knowledge equity problems already present in research, rather than tackling them. Therefore, we urge policymakers and researchers to be more precise about the specific approach they take to OS and more humble about the effects it can have – positive and negative.

ABSTRACT. Abstract for STS NL track 7 ‘making science better?’ 200-300 words

PubPeer Perceptions: how authors view their own papers and those they cite in the light of PubPeer comments Wytske, Fred, Willem, Nathanne, YJ, Raphaël

Concerns about shortcomings in traditional peer review have led to post-publication peer review (PPPR) platforms such as PubPeer. While existing research focuses on the link between PubPeer comments and retractions, the effect of PubPeer comments on the authors and readers of these articles remains unclear. To address this gap, we surveyed two groups: researchers who received a comment on their work (commented group) and, as a proxy for readers, researchers who cited a commented article (citing group). We found that PubPeer comments do reach authors of commented papers, but not the researchers who cite them. For both groups, the majority claimed the comments on PubPeer did not affect the conclusions of their own paper. Many of the citing group explained their reasons for citing the paper were unrelated to the issue mentioned in the PubPeer comments, or that they also cited other articles that supported the same knowledge claim. Interestingly, 41% of the commented group and 26% of the citing group, would still call the issue mentioned in the PubPeer comments an error, but apparently not an error that affects the conclusions of their own paper. The majority of the commented group took action in response to the PubPeer comment, most often by replying on PubPeer or asking the editor for an erratum. The majority of the citing group did not take action and was not planning to do something in response to the PubPeer comment. For instance because they did not find the comments relevant to their work and/or they did not feel it was their responsibility. These findings suggest that PubPeer currently serves more as a feedback mechanism for authors than as a warning system for the broader scientific community.

ABSTRACT. Our study is rooted in classic sociology of scientific knowledge, but instead of analyzing the production of knowledge, we focus on the emergence of ignorance, considering traditional communication channels such as conferences and journals as well as sites that developed in the 21st century such as blogs, Wikipedia, and PubPeer. In the current “ignorance explosion” (Verburgt and Burke 2021, 6), surprisingly little attention has been paid to ignorance resulting from systemic structures. Our guiding question is therefore how ignorance has emerged on a systemic level from institutionalized sites where different actors have discussed spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), a nanoparticle that has been claimed to access the cytosol of mammalian cells. SNAs (and their variants) have been commercialized for five years and have been attempted to be developed into different clinical applications. The analysis is based on publicly available sources (e.g., journal articles in nanobiology, corporate annual reports, patents, blog posts, press releases), six interviews, and material shared by interviewees (e.g., correspondences). We find that information relevant to the discussion is left unrecorded at conferences, difficult to find across genres, lost in technology transfer, overshadowed by dominant corporate imaginaries, kept secret by companies, rarely published in journals, neglected in citation practices, inaccessible in emails held by universities, undetected due to lacking institutional integrity units in a spinoff, removed due to Wikipedia’s structure, or countered with a threat to file a defamation lawsuit. We thus argue that ignorance can inadvertently result from existing structures facilitating scientific knowledge exchange, but in some cases those structures can also be exploited by individuals to create ignorance in the context of a scientific discussion. Individuals and institutions aiming to improve the quality of scientific knowledge production and exchange would ideally take these systemic sources of ignorance into account.

ABSTRACT. Like the social sciences and humanities, the field of spatial planning and design is increasingly turning its attention to soil as a condition for sustainable, climate-adaptive environments. Yet soil is commonly approached instrumentally, framed as a passive substrate, a resource, or a provider of ecosystem services. Within this framing, planning and design projects tend to seek general guidelines, rules of thumb, or design toolboxes that allow soil to be incorporated without sustained engagement. To support this approach, planners and designers often rely on technical consultation with “soil experts,” resulting in planning and design decisions based on abstracted knowledge that overlooks the contextual, social, and ecological roles soils play in our environments.

This research addresses this gap by engaging with soils through hands-on methods in an interdisciplinary collaboration between spatial designers and ethnographers, drawing on soil humanities scholarship. It explores how planners and designers might obtain and operationalise soil knowledge when working in community-led food gardens, where relationships with soil are explicitly enacted.

Over five months, the research team collaborates with two gardening communities in Rotterdam and the Green Heart, participating in gardening activities and observing how people cultivate soil. Insights from these collaborations are translated into “soil characters,” a visual library of the living and non-living elements that shape soil formation. These characters are organised into relational diagrams that reveal soil formation as a socially and materially entangled process. By making these relationships explicit, the project enables collective reflection on how they might be reorganised and how our practices might be reoriented in relation to soil.

By foregrounding relational, site-specific, hands-on knowledge, this research demonstrates how spatial planning and design might operationalize soil humanities scholarship. It contributes to spatial planning and design approaches that treat soils not as technical substrates, but as dynamic ecologies shaped through complex processes and interactions.

ABSTRACT. As sustainability challenges like climate change grow in complexity, the effective design of Nature-based Solutions (NbS), like urban green infrastructure, becomes increasingly urgent. Although NbS can promote climate-resilient and sustainable environments, their success depends on coordinating diverse actors and agencies while considering contextual factors (Mosisa et al., 2025).

This study contends that integrating Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the dynamic, complex relationships among human and non-human actors in NbS. CSH (Ulrich, 1983) offers a lens to examine the assumptions, values, and power structures shaping sustainability interventions, paying attention to boundary judgments and acknowledging whose interests and knowledge are prioritised or excluded (Ulrich & Reynolds, 2020). ANT (Latour, 1987; Law, 1992) emphasises that agency emerges from networks of human and non-human actors, where interactions, rather than individual actors, drive system change (Pels, 1992). ANT complements CSH by grounding critical reflection in empirical network analysis, broadening agency beyond humans. CSH introduces ethical and critical inquiry into network mapping, emphasising justice and inclusion rather than mere description. This holistic, more-than-human approach helps develop actor maps that reveal the often-overlooked complexities, like power relations and system dynamics, crucial in developing effective sustainability interventions.

The research employs a mixed-methods approach, using observation, focus groups, and document analysis, resulting in a More-than-Human Actors Map for a blue-green infrastructure project in the city of Amsterdam. It contributes to STS by providing a theoretical framework and a novel conceptual tool that recognises non-human actors as agents in actor maps that inform NbS design and governance. Challenging hierarchical models, the tool places human and non-human actors equally, emphasising that agency emerges from their interactions. It visualises practices and inscriptions that render non-human actors consequential, highlighting them as mediators that shape other actors' capabilities rather than as passive elements.

ABSTRACT. Soils have recently been productively theorised in the humanities in terms of their onto-epistemological plurality and relationality. Soils are plural not just in the classificatory sense of ‘soil types’, but in the sense of how their very being is understood and is made to matter in the (re)organisation of (a) particular world(s), thus opening up different possible soil futures. Taking this relational pluralisation of soils as a starting point, this article interrogates relatively un(der)explored questions pertaining to the history of soil science, political economies of agriculture, and the governance of life and terrestrial space or geobiopolitics. In contrast to how the opening up of soil concerns, epistemologies, and attentiveness are sometimes presented both in practical and theoretical discourse as distinctly contemporary, this article argues that they are rather to be understood through a longer problematisation of soils that reaches as far back as the 19th century. Through the political history of soil sciences, this paper genealogically reconstructs a problematisation of soils and/as the productive orders of the Earth, revolving around debates on the resourcefulness of soils and in need of geobiopolitical governance. To this end, the first part of the paper is outlines some meta-theoretical reflections regarding the matter at hand, arguing that questions of soils and/as terrestrial orders are to be understood as questions of cosmopolitics structured by the epistemic authority of soil science and the political authority of the (imperial) state. Hereafter, the main body of the text outlines a genealogy of this problematisation of soil, anchored in three historical figurations of concerns with soils’ threatened resourcefulness: 19th century concerns over soil exhaustion, 20th century concerns with soil erosion, and the more recent question of soil degradation. These figurations implicate particular configurations of soil sciences, soil governance, and agrarian political economies, which coalesce around particular re-sourcings of soils and involve particular imaginaries of geobiopolitical orders. Finally, by way of a concluding discussion, this paper reflects on the overarching implications of this problematisation of soils for understanding the politics of soils and soil futures.

ABSTRACT. In the last twenty years, a specialized group of research institutes, including the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), the Future of Life Institute (FLI), and the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), has emerged to study and mitigate existential risks, understood as threats that could lead to human extinction. In this work, we propose a systematic mapping of these key institutes to analyze how they construct the boundaries of what counts as an existential threat. By utilizing a qualitative content analysis of the institutional websites, annual reports, and conference proceedings, we identify the primary risks prioritized by these institutes, such as artificial intelligence, climate change, and biotechnology, and deconstruct the definitions they employ. A central focus of this study is also the "interconnection" of risks, specifically how these institutions frame the relationship between those threats. Do they treat them as isolated threats or as interconnected systemic vulnerabilities? This mapping will show how contemporary ideas about global security are shaped and reveal tensions between speculative engineering approaches and social science perspectives in addressing planetary crises.

ABSTRACT. The rapid loss of biodiversity has been described as the sixth mass extinction event (Wollmuth et al., 2022; Lewis & Maslin, 2015). The World Wildlife Fund submitted to the ICJ a claim for recognition that biodiversity is both under threat and a solution to climate change (WWF, 2024). The ICJ advisory opinion upheld the request from the WWF and the submissions of other governing biodiversity bodies that States must develop mitigation strategies to prevent biodiversity loss (ICJ, 2025). Because measuring biodiversity loss is fraught with inaccurate data and data bias (García-Roselló et al., 2023), there are currently technologies to collect biodiversity data, such as aerial drones and on-the-ground camera traps (Broad, 2025). However, interdisciplinary work in the social sciences and humanities has shown that these issues are also due to a lack of minority representation in biodiversity data collection (Pritchard, 2022). Both of these disciplines also focus on which values are upheld, such as relational value between Indigenous people and biodiversity (Armstrong, 2025; Whyte, 2018). Thus, while both the sciences and humanities are concerned with biodiversity loss, there is a gap between how the natural sciences evaluates the threat of biodiversity loss with technologies, and how the social sciences and humanities evaluate biodiversity loss on values and minorities. How can this evaluation gap with biodiversity loss between the sciences and humanities be bridged? In order to bridge this gap, there needs to be more collaboration between the sciences and humanities in how they evaluate technologies addressing biodiversity loss with underlying issues. I will draw from actor network theory to show the relationship between these technologies, underlying issues, and biodiversity measurement. The result from this analysis will be that these underlying issues can be better addressed if there is a shift within the representation of actors.

ABSTRACT. As artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities advance, debates about AI beyond human controllability and causing catastrophic harm have moved from niche circles into public and policy discourse. Scenarios of AI takeovers, societal collapse, or even human extinction – once confined to speculative fiction – now shape regulatory agendas and funding priorities. AI existential risks (X-risks) are particularly powerful framings, as they invoke irreversible harm, extreme opportunity costs, and closing windows for action.

In the first part of this contribution, I present key findings from an integrative narrative review of core academic X-risk literature (Bareis, Ackerl & Heil, 2025; in press). The review examines the tacit assumptions and rhetorical strategies shaping debates at the intersection of academia, technology sectors, NGOs, politics, and media – despite ongoing contestation over the plausibility of such scenarios. Our analysis reveals a fragmented discourse characterized by bold but frequently weakly substantiated claims, including accelerationist growth assumptions and speculative calculations of catastrophic tipping points. Dominant framings rely on functionalist, anthropomorphic, and metaphysical conceptions of AI, while perspectives foregrounding infrastructure, social agency, political economy, and Big Tech oligopolies remain marginal. As a result, academic debates often reproduce the hype dynamics of public X-risk discourse, blurring the line between speculative projections and empirically grounded concerns.

In the second part, I discuss ongoing research on how X-risks are assessed and addressed across scientific disciplines. Drawing on a DELPHI expert survey and reflection workshop with computer scientists, as well as interdicsiplinary reflection interviews with scholars from the social sciences and humanities (philosophy, media sociology, technology ethics, social ethics and STS/AI ethics), preliminary findings highlight negotiated framings, (disciplinary-rooted) problematizations in relation to discursive blind spots, and divergent understandings of how different AI risks interact and potentially cascade into existential threats.

ABSTRACT. Low-carbon transitions are marked by temporal tensions: inherited infrastructures, ambitious climate targets, and evolving expectations rarely align. These misalignments often lead to a “captivity” of collective futuring practices, where radical visions become constrained by existing sociotechnical arrangements (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Borup et al., 2006). Energy systems provide a striking example, particularly in the case of green hydrogen. Hydrogen produced via electrolysis remains deeply tied to infrastructures (electricity grids, gas pipelines) and economic logics inherited from fossil fuels. In contrast, emerging pathways such as photoelectrochemical (PEC) technologies for solar hydrogen promise autonomy and decentralization. Yet, these promises risk being absorbed into dominant narratives and infrastructural lock-ins, reinforcing centralized logics rather than disrupting them.

This paper asks: What collective representations circulate within the hydrogen community, and how do they constrain the development of PEC technologies?

To address this question, the study combines: - Expert interviews on PEC technologies to capture perceptions of past trajectories, present challenges, and future promises - Stakeholder interviews on electrolysis-based hydrogen projects to identify infrastructural dependencies and representations shaping current strategies - A review of policy frameworks and hydrogen roadmaps to trace assumptions about hydrogen’s evolving role in transitions.

Drawing on STS work on futuring, path dependency, and captivity of imaginaries (Beckert, 2016; Brown & Michael, 2003), preliminary findings suggest that PEC technologies are trapped within visions of hydrogen development strongly influenced by fossil fuel-based systems. Rather than enabling radical change, PEC appears confined to niche applications, limiting its transformative potential. Understanding why futures get stuck is vital for anticipatory governance and adaptive strategies. Studying hydrogen, and in particular PEC technologies, reveals how renewable innovations struggle to escape fossil fuel paradigms, inviting critical reflection on futuring’s conditions and limitations in energy transitions.

ABSTRACT. Touted as a key pillar of industrial decarbonization, hydrogen has spurred a growing body of social science research that continues to expand across new disciplinary, empirical, and conceptual terrains. Much of this work has examined the transnational dimensions of hydrogen – ranging from diplomacy and trade to emerging global production networks – while also engaging critically with questions of (green) extractivism and coloniality, particularly in North–South relations. Yet little is known about how distinct lived experiences with hydrogen across the Global South relate to, diverge from, or illuminate one another.

This article offers a new perspective by drawing on insights from a South–South grassroots encounter held in March 2026 in Namibia, which brought together hydrogen affected community representatives, indigenous leaders, and civil society organizations from Namibia, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. It explores the prospects, possibilities, and challenges for building bottom up South–South interactions, alliances, and solidarities around hydrogen.

The article contributes to scholarship on the political geographies of hydrogen by advancing a transnational perspective ‘from below’, and to South–South cooperation studies by showing how such ties are mobilized and made meaningful within a nascent, uncertain, and speculative industry in decarbonized development.

ABSTRACT. This presentation shares how technological promises in the Chinese hydrogen sector are continually reworked rather than simply realised or abandoned. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with hydrogen start-ups and stakeholders, it explores how hydrogen startups diversify, redirect, and strategically stretch their innovation narratives in the early and uncertain stage of industry formation.

The first set of cases traces how companies move beyond core hydrogen energy applications to construct new fields of imagined value. Fuel-cell developers enter the drone market, promoting hydrogen drones across multiple speculative use-cases; catalyst firms explore biomedical applications alongside hydrogen processing; and start-ups experiment with hydrogen-infused water and healthcare claims as potential revenue streams. Such moves extend the imagined future of hydrogen from energy and industrial infrastructure into lifestyle, health, and consumer domains. At the same time, they generate ambivalence: these strategies can secure investment and survival, yet they also risk being read as hype, potentially destabilising trust in hydrogen innovation more broadly.

A second dynamic concerns spatial and organisational expansion. Competition among local governments for hydrogen investment encourages start-ups to establish subsidiaries and factories across multiple cities in China. While this provides policy support and government grants, the resulting infrastructures sometimes exceed firms’ technological and market needs, shifting organisational effort from technical development towards relationship-management and institutional alignment.

Rather than treating these processes as deviation or failure, the paper conceptualises them as forms of expectation work through which hydrogen futures are negotiated, protected, and continually rewritten. The study contributes to STS debates on sociotechnical expectations by showing how promise-making becomes a survival strategy within an emergent industrial field shaped by policy competition, investment logics, and shifting imaginaries of hydrogen’s value.

ABSTRACT. Hydrogen has seen multiple waves of enthusiasm, with various sociotechnical imaginaries being constructed around it. A crucial enabler of these hydrogen futures is fuel cell technology. Indeed, it could be argued that the dynamics of the various hydrogen hype cycles have as much reflected expectations of fuel cells as of hydrogen. While repeatedly rejected on grounds of cost or reliability, fuel cells retain a hold on sociotechnical imaginations, asking the question: how has the fuel cell managed to retain validity despite protracted and troublesome development?

Many STS accounts of fuel cells centre around the hype cycle of the late 1990s and early 2000s (Bakker and Budde, 2012; Konrad et al., 2012). While histories covering wider temporal periods tend to move between fuel cell families, highlighting different types of fuel cell at different times. (Eisler, 2012; Wallace, 2019). In this work I take a different approach, following the historical pathways of a single fuel cell type, the high temperature solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), critically engaging with the relationships between materials, technology and the changing political economies of R&D and energy. I find a device repeatedly reframed and reorientated around the potential of new materials and processing, with expectation constructed around these promissory materials and designs. Facilitated by reorganisations of R&D management and energy markets, these offered new applications, which sustained sponsorship.

I also propose that such reframing was further enabled by shifting policy imperatives around energy, from 1970s energy crises, pollution worries in the 1980s and later climate concerns. This contributes to the argument that changing narratives and expectations around fuel cells played a social role, providing plausible keystones for the technological optimism prevalent in policy responses to energy crises, giving the impression that solutions were close at hand, allowing difficult social decisions to be postponed and perpetuating business as usual. I suggest the SOFC inhabited two worlds, one of laboratory results and experiments, the other of ideas and imaginaries. Together these worlds created ambiguities where ideas of hydrogen futures could flourish.

Using autoethnographic reflections, oral histories, study of primary sources, and consideration of material design, I offer an account of how fuel cell communities utilised promissory materials and design to mobilise wider expectation, so sustaining legitimacy of their technology and its roles within future hydrogen imaginaries.